Monthly Shaarli
February, 2025
Trump and his team have been busy dismantling – and exposing to public view – the mechanism to the all-encompassing narrative control machine which has been shown to be both authoritarian and industrial in its global scope.
The Musk investigations have begun to peer into the USAID complex. They reveal
The big picture however is not that USAID has been a sub-silo for CIA; that is not revelatory. What is revealing, however, is the evidence that USAID was so heavily involved in domestic influence operations. This latter aspect serves to highlight USAID’s relationship with the CIA and the fact that CIA, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security and USAID were one big Intelligence Community structure, held together (in flimsy legal terms) by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (the role that Tulsi Gabbard will fill now she has been confirmed in post).
Trump’s insistence on Gabbard for the post reflects his absolute need for Intelligence ‘truth’; but it is also likely that the DNI will become the locus for unscrambling and revealing the shadow ‘Intelligence Control Machine’ that is twin to the narrative manipulation complex.
Likely more revelations will follow, as part to a carefully managed release of further exposés – adding to the atmosphere of a breathless hurtling towards a new era. And keeping the opposition off-balance.
The Spectator magazine correctly observes that the head-spinning acceleration towards a new era is not confined to America, Canada, Greenland and Panama: “There is a wind of change blowing through the West. It emanates from Washington DC”, Gavin Mortimer writes.
A number of EU leaders congregated last weekend at a ‘Patriots for Europe’ (PfE) summit in Madrid. Geert Wilders declared:
“We are living in an historic age, and my message to all the old leaders from Macron to Scholz, to your own Pedro Sánchez?: It’s time. It’s over now. They are history”.
Viktor Orbán said:
“The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks … Yesterday we were heretics, today we’re mainstream”.
Marine Le Pen claimed that the West is “facing a truly global turning point … Meanwhile, the European Union seems to be in a state of shock … [in the consensus Brussels view however], Trump isn’t an inspiring figure – but an antagonizing one”.
Nonetheless, in the U.S., the first CBS-YouGov snapshot poll; n) shows what public sentiment thinks of Trump: 69% see him as tough; 63% as energetic; 60 % as focussed, and 58% as effective. His overall job rating stands at 53%. Just how Trump would like his image to be, we imagine.
Trump’s ‘showman’ image and ‘shock psycho-therapy’ clearly works for domestic America. In the world beyond, it is another story. There they have only Trump’s ‘reported’ rhetoric by which to judge. They do not get to see the full theatrical ‘global leadership show’, so his conjuring is understood more literally. And the rest of the world is only too aware of America’s history of broken-words (and withdrawals from agreements).
Overseas, Trump sticks with this same strategy of presenting shock interventions, or rather, an image (Gaza, for example) of an aspirational outcome that is intended to be novel, and to evoke surprise and evenshock. The purpose seems to be to toss a psychological grenade into congealed and stultified political paradigms, hoping to find movement and intending perhaps, to trigger changed conversations.
There can be validity to such an approach, providing it does not just stick a wrench into complex geo-politics. And for Trump, this is a real danger: Advancing extreme and unrealistic notions that can simply confuse and undermine confidence that his outcome could be realistic.
The inescapable fact is that the three key foreign policy issues which Trump faces however, are not ‘conversations’ – they relate to existential wars; to death and destruction. And wars are not so susceptible to off-hand grenade tossing. Worse, ‘careless words’ fired from the hip, have real import and may produce unintended and distinctly adverse consequences.
The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas remains close to the brink of collapse, as [“the magician” [Netanyahu] continues working to sabotage it](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000 "https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000"evertheless Hamas’ pressure in recent days worked, and the ceasefire (for now) continues.
Trump may have believed that by unilaterally raising the stakes (demanding publicly the release of “all” Israeli hostages this Saturday) – thereby collapsing a complex process down to just one single release – he would be able to bring more hostages home quicker. However, in so threatening, he risked the complete collapse of the deal, since the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza in Phase Two, form the absolute bedrock to Hamas’ continued participation in the negotiations.
Any resulting resumption of the Israeli destruction of Gaza would also constitute a black stain on Trump’s aspiration to end wars – for he would then ‘own’ the consequences to a renewal of war in the Middle East.
Netanyahu’s principal concern primordially lies with not completing the deal, but with the continued survival of his government. This was the meaning to his statement in reaction to Trump’s ‘threats’ (hell let loose) that Israel would halt negotiations on Phase Two of the Gaza deal, and in Netanyahu’s echoing of Trump’s demand that Hamas release “all” the hostages on Saturday – or else. The Israeli government however, duly has backtracked under pressure from Hamas – Israel, officials report, has conveyed the message to Hamas that the ceasefire will continue, should the three hostages be released this Saturday.
Whilst it is now obvious from the Trump Team’s discourse that the U.S. is intent to present a new face to the coming multipolar world – “with multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”, as Marco Rubio outlined in a recent interview – it is also true, however, that this change came about (was driven, in fact) by a seismic shift in how the world views America. Rubio effectively admits to this ‘truth’ when he adds that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”.
Some members of the Trump Team, however, persist with threats (‘inflicting maximum pain’, ‘bombing to extinction’) that hark back to the old era of U.S. imperium. That is to say, some of Trump’s Team repeat Rubio’s rubric well enough, but without showing any indication that they have been affected or transformed by the new understanding. The ‘seismic shift’ is two-way.
The World is in a new era too. It has had enough of western unlateral impositions. It is this that triggered their shift. Their swivel of ‘the face that the U.S. presents to the world’ – the one outlined by Rubio. Understanding that both Hegemon and its vassals have transformed demands new approaches by all sides.
When Trump signed a Presidential Order for maximum pressure on Iran, the Supreme Leader simply said “No” to all talks with the U.S. Trump was just too unpredictable and untrustworthy, Khamenei said. Kellogg’s exaggerated claim that Iran ‘is scared’ and effectively defenceless, didn’t bring the expected response of talks. It brought defiance.
The West’s insensibility to what is going on in the world – and why the world is what it is – has been made possible because it was partially disguised through the ability of the U.S. – in the past era – to be able to impose itself on crises, and control the way that those problems were presented across the global narrative machine.
Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Kellogg said recently that Russia’s current sanctions ‘pain level’ is at about 3 out of 10, and that Trump has much more room to raise that ‘pain level’ by putting sanctions pressure on Russian oil and gas:
“You have to put economic pressure; you have to put diplomatic pressure, some type of military pressures and levers that you’re going to use underneath those to make sure [this goes] where we want it to go”.
The arrogance and misreading of the Russian position in Kellogg’s statement is so complete that it brought Russian Deputy FM Sergei Ryabkov to warn that Moscow-Washington relations are “teetering at the brink of complete rupture”; the ‘antagonistic content’ of Russian-U.S. relations has become ‘very critical’ today, Ryabkov cautioned:
“Washington’s attempts to give Moscow demands or to demonstrate the alleged doing of ‘a great favour’ in exchange for unacceptable U.S. demands are bound to end with failure in the dialogue with Russia”.
This ominous signal was stated by Ryabkov, despite Russia actively wanting a strategic, big-picture, written security deal with the U.S. – albeit one achieved on equal terms.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has cataloged the deep-seated Russian experience (and resentment) for the West’s history of duplicity. It runs deep, and begs a question whose answer is yet to be seen: ‘The elephant in the room’. Drafting a paper of understandings on Ukraine is one thing. But Russians remain sceptical as to whether it can achieve a process that is written, binding and trustworthy.
Behind this lies a second question: Russia can see Trump searching for leverage over Moscow. But time (what Yves Smith calls “military time”) runs to a different tempo to that of “political time”. Trump wants to end the conflict, AND be seen to have ended it. The point here is that Russia’s slower military time may end with Trump falling into what Steve Bannon warned could be a deadly trap: ‘Too long, and you (Trump) will end by owning it’ (as Nixon ended up ‘owning’ Vietnam).
Trump Team members may, at one level, ‘understand’ the new balance of power. Yet culturally and unconsciously, they adhere to the notion that the West (and Israel) remain exceptional, and that all other actors only change behaviour through pain and overwhelming leverage.
What did emerge from the transcript of Trump’s long call with Putin was that it touched on big issues and did not at all stay captive to the Ukraine issue.
Yves Smith puts the ‘elephant in the room’ issue this way:
“It took a full 17 years from Putin’s 2008 Munich Security Conference speech, where he called for a multipolar world order, for the U.S. to officially acknowledge, via Mark Rubio, that the U.S. unipolar period was unnatural and had ended”.
Let us hope it will not take as long for Russia to achieve a new European security architecture. As The Telegraph avers: “This is Putin and Trump’s world now”.
(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation by permission of author or representative)
As you read this, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian doctor from Gaza, is likely still in Israeli detention – and, according to mounting evidence, being tortured.
Despite the recent hostage swap with Hamas, multiple health professionals are still being held captive, with abundant reports of mistreatment, neglect and torture. One of these is Dr. Abu Safiya, arrested on December 27 and transferred to the notorious Sde Teyman prison camp (dubbed Israel’s version of Guantanamo Bay).
As each day passes, and with reports from released prisoners who attest Dr. Abu Safiya was being tortured while they were in the same prison, fears of his death grow. At least three Palestinian doctors abducted from Gaza have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.
Dr. Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was abducted after the Israeli army had repeatedly attacked the hospital over the course of over three months, ultimately invading it, burning and severely damaging essential buildings, and detaining dozens of medical staff. By now the chilling scene of Dr. Hussam walking toward the Israeli tank has gone viral, as people around the world demand his release.
According to Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British charity working in Palestine, when the Israeli army invaded the hospital, _“an estimated 350 people, including patients, were forced to leave the hospital. Some patients arrived at the Indonesian Hospital, which was not able to provide any care after being forced out of service by the Israeli military on 24 December. The last remaining partially operational hospital in the North Gaza Governorate, al-Awda Hospital, is on the brink of collapse, struggling to function amid relentless attacks and resource shortages.”_
The non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that after abducting him, “the Israeli army subsequently transferred Dr. Abu Safiya to a field interrogation site in the Al-Fakhura area of Jabalia Refugee Camp: where he was stripped and whipped with a thick wire commonly used for street electrical wiring.”
The torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has been widely reported. Methods include electric shocks to genitals, stress positions, psychological torture, near-starvation, and rape resulting in serious internal damage, sometimes leading to death.
Following a request by the non-profit organization Physicians for Humans Rights-Israel (PHRI) for a legal visit to Abu Safiya, the Israeli military claimed that it had “found no indication of the arrest or detention of the individual in question.”
https://twitter.com/PHRIsrael/status/1875906201206300999
However, one report cites Palestinians released from Sde Teiman detention camp on December 29th 2024 saying Dr. Abu Safiya was being held at Sde Teiman. One of the released Palestinians said the doctor had given him the phone numbers of his sons, and requested that The Red Cross and media look into his situation.
On January 5, PHRI posted on X, “The Israeli military also continues to withhold information about Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s detention location, despite retracting their earlier claim that he isn’t being held in Israel.”
A more recently-released detainee, Hazem Alwan, said he had been abducted from Jabalia by the Israeli army and used as a human shield before ultimately being taken to an Israeli prison, where he says he spent two days with Dr. Abu Safiya.
“It was clear the brutal methods of torture used by the occupation on him. Dr. Hussam is in danger, nobody is looking after him. His mental state is completely shattered, completely…”
https://twitter.com/EvaKBartlett/status/1877970695558189344
In October 2024, when the Israeli army invaded Kamal Adwan Hospital, they killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s son, Ibrahim. But Dr. Abu Safiya continued to work to help injured Palestinians in the dire conditions of northern Gaza.
In November 2024, he was injured in an Israeli quad-copter drone attack, believed to be, “an assassination attempt by Israel due to his unwavering commitment to providing medical care to patients in northern Gaza.”
He continued his updates from the besieged hospital, on December 6, 2024, noting, “The situation inside and around the hospital is catastrophic. There are a large number of martyrs and wounded, including 4 martyrs from the hospital’s medical staff, and there are no surgeons left.”
He spoke of the series of Israeli airstrikes, just outside the hospital, and of being forced by Israeli soldiers to evacuate all patients, displaced persons and medical staff to the hospital yard and forcibly take them out to the checkpoint.
“In the morning, we were shocked to see hundreds of dead bodies and wounded people in the streets surrounding the hospital.”
On January 9, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, , an NGO based in the Gaza Strip, noted that, Dr. Abu Safiya’s detention was extended until February 13, 2025 by an Israeli Court” and that his legal counsel – which has been prevented from seeing him – will remain banned from visiting the doctor until January 22.
Still another doctor, Dr. Akram Abu Ouda, head of Orthopedics at the Indonesian Hospital (also in northern Gaza) is missing. Ramy Abdu (of Euro-Med) noted, “He has been detained by Israel for over a year, and it is our duty to remind the world he is wrongfully imprisoned, suffering under torture, with his health deteriorating.”
Isr**ael tortured Palestinian doctors to death**
In September 2024, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, stated, “Dr. Ziad Eldalou is the third doctor confirmed to have died while being detained by Israel since 7 October 2023.”
Eldalou was, the OHCHR [notes](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/un-expert-shocked-death-another-palestinian-doctor-israeli-detention#:~:text=“Dr.,Hospital, located in Gaza City), was an internal medicine physician at Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital, detained with other healthcare workers by invading Israeli soldiers on March 18, 2024, who died just three days later, while in detention.
In its report on Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Euro-Med recalls the murders of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of the orthopedics department at Al-Shifa Hospital, who was “killed under torture at Ofer Detention Centre on April 19, 2024,” and Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi, head of the obstetrics department at Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was “killed due to torture at an Israeli Shin Bet interrogation center in Ashkelon, one week after his detention in November 2023. Israeli authorities concealed his death for more than seven months.”
Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was “likely raped to death,” wrote United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese.
These murders, and the imprisonment and torture of numerous Palestinian doctors from Gaza, and the killing of over 1,000 Palestinian health and medical professionals, are part of Israel’s systematic attack on every aspect of Gaza’s health care system, as well as on the Palestinians’ morale: seeing doctors who didn’t abandon their patients be imprisoned, tortured and killed is a crushing blow.
Both Mofokeng and Albanese at the beginning of January, 2025, issued an urgent warning: “We are horrified and concerned by reports from northern Gaza and especially the attack on the healthcare workers including the last remaining of 22 now destroyed hospitals: Kamal Adwan Hospital.”
https://twitter.com/drtlaleng/status/1872212664946250184
“We are gravely concerned with the fate of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, yet another doctor to be harassed, kidnapped and arbitrarily detained by the occupation forces, in his case for defying evacuation orders to leave his patients and colleagues behind. This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza.”
The lack of information on Dr. Abu Safiya’s well-being, the testimonies from released abductees that he was being tortured, and the prohibition on him accessing his lawyer have heightened fears that he could die in Israeli detention.
This must not be allowed to happen. As Euro-Med stated, immediate international intervention is needed for his release. What’s even more tragic is that were he being held by one of the West’s proclaimed ‘adversaries’, rather than its allies, such intervention would not be long in coming.
The great unspoken fact of the 1930s was that the world was drifting to war, a trend that nobody knew how to stop.
The great unspoken fact of the 2020s is that the global economy is in the process of inflecting from growth into contraction, and, again, this is a process that no-one can halt, still less put into reverse.
Logically, countries, groups and individuals must strive to work out how to fare best in an economy that has become a less-than-zero-sum game. Their relative success or failure in this endeavour will be a function of how much they know about it, and how early they are in gaining that knowledge.
What do they know?
This leads to a question that often arises here, which is that of how far ‘the powers that be’ are aware of this.
It seems logical to assume that somebody, somewhere, must have figured this out. Getting to the facts of the situation isn’t exactly rocket-science. All that’s really required is the kind of cool objectivity that rejects consensus wishful-thinking, and repudiates, as unrealistic, the orthodox notion that we can be assured of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’.
With global economic inflexion understood, the issue becomes one of competitive advantage.
Seen strategically, America is in the midst of a gigantic economic gambit, the bet being that extreme fiscal stimulus can re-shore and expand important industries to a point of critical mass before the burden of soaring public debt either cripples the dollar or, more probably, calls time on super-gigantic stimulus.
Nobody can imagine that the current trajectory of US government borrowing is sustainable. But an important strategic advantage can be seized if lenders – and overseas lenders in particular – are willing to fund what is, essentially, a competitive, national-advantage economic agenda
There is, by the way, nothing wrong with pursuing national economic advantage – it’s what governments do.
The counter-gambit is that the BRICS+ countries are trying to build a competing economic bloc strong enough to defend its member countries from the aggressive economic strategy of the United States.
These are examples of move and counter-move in the wholly new context of involuntary economic de-growth.
To a significant extent, countries outside these completing blocs have to decide where their own best interests lie.
The energy key
It should be beyond obvious that energy is critical to these issues. Our reliance on fossil fuels has created two juxtaposed vulnerabilities.
The first is that we may inflict irreparable climatic and ecological damage to the Earth’s environment, and this will have economic as well as human consequences.
The second is that the diminishing economic value of oil, natural gas and coal is putting economic growth into reverse.
Anyone clever enough to figure out the realities of economic inflexion must also be smart enough to realise that renewable energy sources can’t provide a complete, like-for-like replacement for the energy value hitherto sourced from oil, natural gas and coal. Renewables expansion is simply too materials-intensive for this to happen, and the requisite raw materials can only be obtained through the agency of legacy fossil fuel energy.
To anyone who has reached this conclusion, the deceleration of energy transition – and the corresponding slowing of the move from ICE to battery-powered vehicles – will have come as no surprise at all.
This isn’t to say that renewables (and their transport ancillaries) don’t have important roles to play in the economic future. The manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, grids, power-storage systems and EVs are important industries, certainly in terms of employment, though improbably in terms of profit. If we’re going to build these things anyway, it’s better that the building of them takes place at home rather than overseas.
But it’s one thing to try to corner as much energy-transition activity as you can, and quite another to believe that renewables are capable of taking over from fossil fuels in an economy that carries on growing.
Crisis management, or the art of pretend-and-extend
To a significant extent, politics is a matter of crisis management, something in which participants are successful if the eventuation of crisis can be pushed out far enough into the future that it doesn’t happen on their watch.
This explains much of the apparent madness now visible in global economic and financial affairs.
Various instances illustrate these processes.
In the United Kingdom, a large and rising proportion of home-buyers are now taking out mortgages whose terms extend beyond the borrowers’ dates of retirement. This may seem both irrational and dangerous, but it’s part of a financial mechanism dictated by political choice. There’s no divine diktat which says that a country must push the prices of homes out of the reach of most of its own citizens, but policies which would deflate the property price bubble haven’t attracted sufficient political support to become feasible.
It seems safe to conclude that somebody in the corridors of power must know that Britain has become a post-growth, credit-dependent economy. Over the past twenty years, and with everything stated at constant 2023 values, the government has borrowed £2.1tn, roughly half of which has been backstopped by the net-of-QT money-creation of the central bank. Private borrowers have been more cautious, but have nevertheless increased their debts by close to £800bn. All of this is reinforced by rapid credit expansion in the NBFI or “shadow banking” sector.
The result of all this credit-bingeing and money-creation is an economy that’s only £625bn, or 30%, bigger now than it was in 2003, and most of that “growth” is itself the cosmetic effect of spending borrowed money.
The immediate need is to walk a tight-rope between interest rates that are high enough to prop up the currency, but low enough not to burst the real estate bubble. Assurances of ‘growth’ are pure PR-exercises in an economy that can’t, nowadays, house its population, bring down colossal health-care waiting lists, or stop polluting its rivers and seas with untreated sewage.
In short, the British authorities are playing extend-and-pretend.
But they shouldn’t be taken too hardly to task for that, for two main reasons. First, many other countries, arguably most of them, are doing exactly the same thing.
Second, there are no good alternatives to ‘extend-and-pretend’.
Likewise, the United States reported real-terms growth of $675bn last year, but the government had to run a $2.4tn fiscal deficit to enable this to happen, and is now adding public debt at the rate of $1tn every hundred days. Nobody in his or her right mind could contend that this is sustainable, but America has the advantage of a currency that’s the least-dirty shirt in the global laundry-basket.
China, meanwhile, is trying to manage the implosion of a gigantic real-estate Ponzi scheme, but nobody could imagine that this event came unexpectedly, out-of-the-blue. Like Britain, China’s total borrowing over the past twenty years has far exceeded reported growth, in this instance in the ratio of 4.4:1, with the difference that private entities, rather than the state itself, have undertaken most (almost four-fifths) of this borrowing.
Japan is persisting with monetary policies which have halved the dollar value of the yen since the inception of “Abenomics” back in 2012.
In short, much of what looks like madness – British mortgages, US Federal debt, Chinese real-estate, and the monetary policies of the Bank of Japan – turns out to be exercises in ‘extend and pretend’.
Getting to the real
Those of us who want to work out how things are really unfolding are perfectly capable of doing so. Stripping out credit-effect distortion from reported GDP brings us to a calculation of underlying or ‘clean’ economic output (C-GDP) which correlates remarkably closely to the quantities of primary energy used in the economy.
The further deduction of surging ECoEs – the Energy Costs of Energy – provides a calculation of prosperity which is a pretty good fit with what’s been experienced in recent times.
On the latter calculation, the World was 28% more prosperous in 2023 than it was in 2003, but population numbers increased by 26% between those same years.
We can, if we so wish, make corresponding calculations about the future. As ECoEs carry on rising, and as renewables prove incapable of providing a complete replacement for the energy value hitherto sourced from fossil fuels, aggregate material prosperity will fall, gradually in the balance of the 2020s but much more rapidly in the 2030s.
In comparison with 2023, the world’s average person is likely to be only about 7% poorer by 2030, but fully 25% worse off by 2040.
At the same time, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities will carry on rising, applying leveraged compression to the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services.
Where the financial corollaries of these material economic trends are concerned, we can assume that ‘extend-and-pretend’ will remain the only game in town, meaning that debt and quasi-debt will carry on rising – and the spending of this credit will carry on being presented as “growth” – until the credibility of money has been destroyed.
The strategic aim isn’t to side-step this process, but to ensure that your currency doesn’t win this ‘race to the bottom’.
The rate at which credit will rise will force the authorities back onto the path of QE, ZIRP and NIRP, because there’s no other way of maintaining the fiction that the economy is capable of servicing these soaring debts.
We can, on these same lines, work out which sectors will face the most severe compression, and figure out which countries and which currencies are leading the race to the bottom.
We can do all of these things and, if we so wish, we can share our findings.
But we can’t expect any of this to make us popular.
Until quite recently, the idea that the global economy might reverse – my preferred term is inflect – from growth into contraction lived in the realm of radical and unwelcome theory.
But this has been the year in which theory has been borne out by experience.
Much as astronomers deduce the existence of invisible objects through their gravitational effects on other bodies, we can see the effects of economic inflexion in everything from social discontent and the “cost of living crisis” to deteriorating international relations and worsening financial fragility.
The causes of the ending and reversal of growth can be summed up in the single word depletion.
Fossil fuel energy has been depleted to a point where its material costs, measured here as the Energy Costs of Energy (ECoEs), are becoming unaffordable.
Non-energy natural resources, too, such as minerals, agricultural land and accessible water, have been depleted, as has the finite ability of the environment to absorb the effects of human economic activity.
1
It has turned out to be perfectly possible to measure, interpret and anticipate these economic processes, and that’s been the aim of the Surplus Energy Economics project from the outset.
But two centuries of industrial expansion have been quite enough to render economic reversal very nearly incomprehensible to most people, and almost entirely unacceptable.
Our first collective responses have involved simple denial, based on the ‘infinite growth’ promises of an economics orthodoxy firmly rooted in pre-industrial conditions, when none of today’s resource challenges were even conceivable.
Our second resort has been to hubris, manifested in the idea that human ingenuity, implemented as technology, can resolve all of our energetic, material and environmental problems. This can, supposedly, offer a seamless, with-growth transition to alternative energy sources, and perhaps even “de-couple” the economy from the use of energy.
The snag here is that the potential scope of technology is bounded by limits set by the laws of physics. The looming failure of technology is going to come as a gigantic shock to the system.
We’ll look at this impending failure shortly.
Reality, meanwhile, is breaking through, as it always does. Few voters now believe that their economic conditions have been improving in recent times, that the current extent of inequality is justifiable, or that soaring living costs are either fully reported or are traceable to one-off bits of simple bad luck. They’re increasingly attracted to scapegoating foreigners, who might be immigrants, or dishonest trading partners.
The authorities, meanwhile, have been drawn towards the ‘extend and pretend’ of reckless credit expansion, to ‘getting their retaliation in first’ against rising popular discontent, and to trying to skew the patterns of international trade to their own national advantage.
Before we judge them too harshly, though, we should remember – in this season of goodwill – that the process of inflexion itself is entirely outside their control, and that, one by one, all of the supposed “levers” of economic management have broken in their hands.
2
The formal commencement of the industrial economy can be dated to 1776, when James Watt completed the first truly efficient device for converting heat into work.
But this was to be no sudden revolution. Even in Britain, where this process began, battleships were still made of wood, and powered by wind, into and beyond the 1850s. Industrialization began quite slowly in Europe and North America before extending, again gradually, into all corners of the world.
This said, and with a tiny scattering of exceptions, even the last countries in which industrialization took hold have been living with assumed economic growth for well over a century.
The ending and reversal of growth is, therefore, a profound culture-shock, up-ending generations of almost unchallenged expectation.
It’s a revolution far more sweeping in its implications even than the removal of absolute monarchy, or the arrival and subsequent failure of communism in the USSR and its satellites.
This means that we need to start looking for the practices, systems and institutions that will be swept aside by this revolution – and, conversely, at what might replace them.
3
It helps us to know that two assumptions, above all, will be overturned by the ending and reversal of growth.
One of these is that each generation will be more materially prosperous than the one before.
The second is the notion that economic expansion is coterminous with progress. If somebody opposes the bulldozing of farmland or the destruction of historic artefacts for the building of a retail mall, motorway or factory, he or she is portrayed as an obstacle to progress. The word Luddite entered the English language as a term describing futile, unreasoning opposition to the unstoppable march of modernity.
The ever-perceptive Charles Hugh Smith has explained that a lot of what we continue to think of as ‘progress’ has in fact become Anti-Progress, a concept which he has connected to the collapse of quality. Your new domestic appliance, for example, might be wi-fi connected (”progress”), but won’t work as well, or last as long, as the old one (“anti-progress”).
4
We can look at this, quite reasonably, as the product of misaligned incentives, where it’s more profitable to sell the customer a new and inferior product every five years than a higher-quality, more repairable one every twenty-five.
But there are structural factors involved as well.
In pre-industrial times, raw materials were costly, in the sense that their supply required large amounts of human labour. In these conditions, it made far more sense to use hard-won, costly timber to make furniture or buildings that would last for generations than to construct shoddier alternatives that would require replacement in a small number of years.
The advent of cheap and abundant energy changed all that, making possible a profit-incentivized shift to an accelerated cycle of creation, disposal and replacement. This is how the energy-dissipative economic model of the past became the dissipative-landfill commercial system of today.
This system will unravel, not as a matter of commercial practice or social preference, but because of changes in the productive-replacement equation itself.
5
Contrary to the quaint notions of orthodox economics, the central processes of the economy are material, not monetary.
The defining purpose of the economy is to supply physical products and services to society.
Services are no less material than goods – we can’t run an e-commerce business without vehicles and warehouses, or supply on-line services without cables and computers.
Since a society without a history is as disconnected as a person without a memory, we can safely assume that history will continue to be taught and studied, long after economics has been subsumed into the sciences of thermodynamics and the characteristics of materials.
These historians of the future will be amused, as well as baffled, by contemporary notions that we could build an immaterial economy based on services, or somehow “de-couple” the energy economy from the use of energy. They’re likely to laugh out loud at the notion of ‘infinite, exponential economic expansion on a finite planet’.
The material economy works by using energy to convert non-energy resources into products. These then wear out, and are abandoned and replaced. Critically, the speed at which this cyclical process operates is determined by the relative costs of the necessary inputs.
These inputs are human labour, energy and raw materials.
When each of these inputs was costly, the lifespans of products were extended as far as possible. Cheap and abundant energy made each of these inputs less expensive – production required less human labour, the cost-efficiency of resource extraction rose sharply, and the cost of energy itself was low.
In consequence, life-spans of products became ever less important, and the relinquishment-replacement cycle was accelerated. The creation of the dissipative-landfill system has been a product, not of fashion, or even of incentive, but of evolving material circumstances.
Because this process has been material in its characteristics, nobody has been able to call a halt to it, any more than the advocates of a more human-scale approach could halt the takeover of England by “dark satanic mills”.
6
The lesson to be learned from this is that prevalent commercial practice, far from being driven by the latest vogue in business-speak or the most recent pronouncements of management text-books, is determined by material conditions.
And these, as we know, are now changing rapidly. Raw materials, like energy itself, are fast ceasing to be cheap. The balance of cost and scarcity between human labour and exogenous energy is tilting rapidly from the latter to the former.
The ultimate exponents of the rapid-replacement model aren’t manufacturers, or suppliers of services broadly understood, but the behemoths of the “tech” sector. Their business models are tied, to a quite remarkable degree, to the already-failing presumption of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’.
These business models are, to a greater or lesser extent, based on the assumptions of ever-cheaper raw materials, ever more abundant energy, and ever-expanding consumer discretionary affordability.
Yet these assumptions are already becoming twentieth-century notions, preserved in aspic.
The context, looking ahead, is set out in the following charts. In America, as elsewhere, top-line economic output – adjusted to exclude credit distortions, and known here as underlying or “clean” output (C-GDP) – has long been decelerating towards contraction. Meanwhile, the first call made on output by ECoE has been widening the gap between output and material prosperity (Fig. 1A).
Fig. 1
At the same time, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities have been rising, such that the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services, shown in blue in Fig. 1B, is subject to relentless compression.
The United States has been chosen to illustrate these trends because of the differences between Figs. 1C and 1D.
Over a very long period, as the rate of discretionary expansion has fallen below the rate of increase in the population, the average American has experienced a continuing, but gradual, reduction in the affordability of discretionaries (Fig. 1C).
But aggregate discretionary affordability has carried on creeping upwards even as its per capita equivalent has drifted downwards.
This seems to have left many businesses wholly unprepared for the impending rapid decline of discretionary affordability.
The acid-test of vulnerability to these effects is the extent of exposure to discretionary compression. On-line retailing can continue pretty solidly, though it will tilt away from discretionaries and towards staples. EVs have a future, but only as niche products, since the replacement of all (or even most) of the World’s 2bn cars and commercial vehicles is a material impossibility.
On the other hand, anything dependent on advertising or subscription revenues, or on the mass sale of non-essential gadgets to the public, is heading over the Niagara of contracting discretionary purchasing.
7
The way in which energy-hungry behemoths turn into dinosaurs will have a critical bearing on how society and the financial system adapt to the ending and reversal of material economic growth.
Embodying a law of diminishing returns, each new iteration of “tech” is more energy-intensive, and seems to add less material value, than the one before, and the sector is already starting to feel the headwinds of a decelerating replacement cycle.
This is typified by smart-phones, where annual units sold peaked back in 2015. The first cell-phone was a major breakthrough, as were the first smart-phones, but subsequent developments have added ever less valuable capabilities at ever increasing costs.
AI, the latest passing vogue in “tech” circles, exemplifies the pursuit of energy-intensive innovation for the sake of innovation itself, and for some very short-lived financial gains. Everybody seems to accept that AI will make enormous demands on energy, but nobody seems to be really clear about how it will add value.
The general (though rather vague) notion seems to be that AI will make profits by replacing human labour. In fact, though, human labour will be increasingly abundant as the economy contracts, whilst ever-higher thresholds will be set for the prioritization of energy use.
Some suppliers of energy-intensive tech services are already giving thought to investing in their own energy sources, typically small modular reactors, which might enable them to cool as well as power their sprawling data-centres.
What this idea overlooks, however, is the impossibility of re-energizing the economy in which their customers reside.
With no such capability possible, a combination of decreasing prosperity and ever-costlier necessities has already started to exert an ever-tightening stranglehold on the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services.
8
What, though, will be the wider implications of technological disillusionment for the broader human endeavour?
The word “technology” has two distinct meanings in contemporary parlance. To scientists and engineers, it means the implementation of human ingenuity in the material world. To investors and business bosses, it means a hugely successful sector that rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the dot-com bust.
To the general public, it probably denotes a combination of the two, a phenomenon which is both enabling and threatening, and something whose unstoppable advance only a card-carrying Luddite would seek to halt.
Humanity, and perhaps every sentient creature, seeks to alter its environment to conditions most favourable to itself. The human project has coined the word “technology” to describe our efforts in this regard.
Hitherto, we’ve been able to look back at the history of technology as an ascending march of progress. Noteworthy names in this progression include Watt, George and Robert Stephenson, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Karl Benz, John Logie Baird, Frank Whittle and Robert Watson-Watt.
We’ve learned, too, from our failures, as when Capt. Cowper Coles’ inherently unstable turret-ship HMS Captain capsized off Finisterre, and when John Blenkinsop invested in spiked wheels on the grounds that railway locomotives with smooth wheels wouldn’t be able to move.
9
The critical point about technology, though, is that it has to work within the envelope of material and energetic possibility. Orville and Wilbur Wright, for instance, didn’t invent the aeroplane and then sit around waiting for somebody to discover petroleum. Rather, they found a novel and worthwhile application for a source of energy that was already available.
Modern technology has delivered marvels, and we seem, in any case, to have an instinctive attraction to the new and shiny. Technology has been elevated to the status of a secular deity, capable of resolving our each and every problem.
And this is why our disillusionment with technology, as it arrives, will be such a shock. Because of their inferior material characteristics, renewables can’t restore growth to the economy, or even keep it at its current size. Engineering can’t resolve our environmental problems in ways that allow excess consumption, and super-rapid resource depletion, to continue.
If, at this festive time, you’ll allow me a single cliché, ‘as one door closes, another opens’. There are alternatives to our current arrangements, and perhaps we’ll discuss these in the future.
This is a set of facts and references compiled by independent researchers Debbie Lerman and Sasha Latypova.
Editorial note - my readers know that I have been vocal about covid as military operation since early 2022. I personally arrived at the conclusion that the massive harm from the covid shots and other government “pandemic response” measures was fully intentional. For purposes of this dossier, which Debbie and I disseminated to many other journalists and independent researchers, our aim was to remove any personal opinion and leave a dry, fact-only record. The readers can draw their own conclusions from this set of facts.
Due Diligence and Art is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
We have also recorded a 38 min video where we discuss the background and our own thinking about the global military-intelligence campaign which continues to date:
Please help us share this information far and wide. Feel free to repost/use any material herein and use the reference for further investigation. We appreciate credit, but it is also not obligatory. These are the facts from publicly available documentation.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Covid Dossier is a compilation of the evidence we have amassed over the last three years supporting the following claim:
Covid was not a public health event, although it was presented as such to the world’s population. It was a global operation, coordinated through public-private intelligence and military alliances and invoking laws designed for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) weapons attacks.
The Dossier contains information regarding the military/intelligence coordination of the Covid biodefense response in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. For some countries we have extensively documented information. For others, we have some documentation of military/intelligence involvement, but not all the details. For as many countries as possible, we list the military/intelligence agencies in charge of their country’s Covid response; dates on which emergency declarations were made in each country; military/intelligence-related agencies and bodies in charge of censorship/propaganda; and top people with military/intelligence jobs who were known or reported to hold leadership positions in the response. We also list connections to global governing bodies, including the EU and UN/WHO, through which the response was coordinated. In the final section, we provide a list of military/intelligence/biodefense alliances that provide multinational frameworks for responding to a bioterror/bioweapons attack.
By providing all of this information in one place, we hope to dispel the notion that Covid was a public health event, managed independently by each country’s public health agencies, with some limited, logistically focused military involvement. We also hope to drive home the shocking realization that not only were military and intelligence agencies in charge of Covid in all of these countries, but the response to what was represented as a public health crisis was coordinated through military alliances, including NATO.
This should be the subject of front-page news everywhere.
We are calling on investigators, whistleblowers, and anyone with information related to this topic to contact us and/or publish the information so that we can continue to construct the full picture of what happened to the world starting in early 2020 and continuing to this day.
HOW IT STARTED: FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY
Exactly five years ago, on February 4th, 2020, two things happened that almost nobody knows about, but that played an important role in the course of recent world history:
- Two declarations for CBRN (weapons of mass destruction) emergencies – EUA and PREP Act – made by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, were registered on this date. [ref][ref]
EUA stands for Emergency Use Authorization. Legally, EUA powers are intended for situations of grave, immediate emergencies involving weapons of mass destruction. They allow for the use of countermeasures against CBRN (chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological) agents without the regulatory oversight intended to ensure safety and efficacy, because the immediate threat of a CBRN attack is deemed so much greater than any potential risks caused by the countermeasures.[ref] The PREP Act is the legal indemnity granted to anyone involved in using an EUA countermeasure, because if a weapon of mass destruction is involved, the risk of the CBRN attack is so great that no one should face legal consequences for potential collateral damage caused by using unregulated countermeasures.
In order to activate EUA, the law requires “A determination by the Secretary of HHS that there is a public health emergency… that involves a CBRN agent or agents, or a disease or condition that may be attributable to such agent(s). [ref] So when the EUA was officially activated on February 4, 2020, it was in essence a declaration of a state of emergency involving weapon(s) of mass destruction.
- A pharmaceutical executive was caught on tape saying that the U.S. Department of Defense called to inform him “that the newly discovered Sars-2 virus posed a national security threat.” [ref]
It is important to note that on February 4, 2020, there were fewer than a dozen confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus disease (later called Covid-19) in the US, and zero deaths. Worldwide, the death count was fewer than 500. There was nothing about the virus, at least as it was presented publicly, that would make anyone believe it posed a threat to national security.
These two events are remarkable for several reasons:
-
They indicate that the beginnings of Covid were rooted in national security machinations, not public health considerations.
-
They also strongly suggest that the deployment of the EUA “medical countermeasures” under Public Health Emergency declaration was officially launched at a time when an emergency, much less a national or a global one, could not possibly be determined. No public health parameters justifying that a novel virus posed a “threat to national security” existed at the time of the EUA and PREP Act declarations.
Thus, on this day five years ago, a military CBRN countermeasure deployment campaign was officially launched against a poorly defined illness that was alleged to have killed a few hundred people worldwide.
Within six weeks of this date, in order to ensure a market for the countermeasures (among other aims), the lockdown-until-vaccine response – which is a military/counterterrorism plan and has nothing to do with public health [ref] – went into effect all over the world.
WHY THIS INFORMATION IS CRUCIAL
It is crucially important to understand that Covid was a globally coordinated response, based on legal frameworks intended for biodefense/biowarfare situations. The attack that initiated the global Covid response could have been real, perceived or invented – regardless of the trigger, the lockdown-until-vaccine paradigm originated in the military/intelligence biodefense playbook, not in any scientifically based or epidemiologically established public health plan.[ref]
This means that nothing about the response – masking, distancing, lockdowns, vaccines – was part of a public health plan to respond to a disease outbreak. Rather, every aspect of the response was intended to induce public panic in order to gain compliance with biodefense operations, culminating with the injection of unregulated mRNA products, which were legally treated as biodefense military countermeasures (MCMs), into billions of human beings.
Who ordered and directed these operations? Who benefited from them? Who was and still is covering them up? We have been investigating these questions for the last several years, and we hope many who read this will join us moving forward.
CALL TO ACTION
Most journalists in both corporate and alternative spaces are either unaware or unwilling to cover the military/intelligence/biodefense/global coordination aspects of Covid. We need to change that.
Please help us shift the conversation to focus on the true nature of the Covid response and the existential questions raised by it.
To learn more, you’ll find extensive research and analysis on our Substacks:
Top-level summaries of our understanding of the Covid response can be found in these articles:
#### Summary of Everything and Quick Links, Updated - end of 2024.
June 26, 2023
Covid Dossier: U.S.
Military/intelligence agencies in charge of pandemic response:
-
National Security Council (NSC) [ref]
-
FEMA/Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [ref]
-
Department of Defense (DOD) [ref]
Dates when those agencies were known to be in charge:
-
Mid-January 2020: NSC classified Covid meetings “starting mid-January” [ref]
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March 13, 2020: NSC officially in charge of pandemic policy in Pandemic Crisis Action Plan-Adapted – the U.S. government’s Covid response plan [ref]
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March 18, 2020: FEMA/DHS takes over as Lead Federal Agency, replacing HHS [ref]
Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:
-
February 4, 2020 EUA declaration [ref]
-
February 4, 2020 [retroactive from March 17, 2020] PREP Act declaration [[ref]](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/17/2020-05484/declaration-under-the-public-readiness-and-emergency-preparedness-act-for-medical-countermeasures)
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March 13, 2020 Stafford Act in all states simultaneously (1st time in history) [ref]
Military/intelligence agencies involved in public communications/propaganda/censorship:
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Government Task Force, coordinated by NSC, controls all pandemic messaging starting February 27, 2020 [ref][ref]
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Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [ref]
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Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [ref]
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Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) (crossover US/UK) [ref]
Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO:
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Michael Callahan[ref] [See also PsyWar by Robert Malone MD MS, Kindle version p. 237]
-
Carter Mecher [ref]
-
Matt Pottinger [ref]
Covid Dossier: U.K.
Military/intelligence agencies in charge of pandemic response:
Dates those agencies were publicly known to be in charge:
-
March 18, 2020: Covid Support Force (20,000 military personnel) [ref]
-
May 2020: (at the latest) JBC [ref][ Wikipedia: “it’s existence was announced”]
Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:
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March 23, 2020 national lockdown [[ref](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-23-march-2020)]
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March 25, 2020 Coronavirus Act 2020 [ref]
Military/IC-affiliated groups involved in messaging/propaganda/censorship:
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Ministry of Defense team [ref]
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iSAGE [ref]
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77th Brigade [ref]
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Nudge Unit [ref from March 11 2020] / Behavioral Insights Team – now “fully owned by Nesta” (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) [ref]
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RAF analysts [ref]
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Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) (crossover US/UK)[ref]
Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO
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Roy Anderson [ref]
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Clare Gardiner [ref]
-
Thomas Waite [ref]
-
Simon Manley (UK Director-General Covid-19) [ref]
Covid Dossier: Australia
Military/intelligence agencies and special committees involved in response:
-
National Cabinet “exempt from freedom of information laws”[ref]
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National Security Committee of Cabinet [ref]
-
Australian Defense Force COVID-19 Task Force [ref]
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National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board (NCC) [ref]
Dates those agencies/committees were publicly known to be in charge:
-
March 9, 2020: Australian Defense Force COVID-19 Task Force [ref]
-
March 13, 2020: National Cabinet established [ref]
-
March 25: NCC [ref]
Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:
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March 5, 2020 National Coordination Mechanism activated [ref]
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March 13, 2020 National Partnership on COVID-19 Response [ref]
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March 18, 2020 Human Biosecurity Emergency Declaration (first in history) [ref]
Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO:
Covid Dossier: Canada
Military/intelligence agencies and special committees involved in response:
-
Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Operation LASER 24,000-person response force [ref]
-
CAF Operation VECTOR (vaccine planning and distribution)[ref]
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Cabinet Committee on COVID-19 [ref]
Dates those agencies/committees were publicly known to be in charge:
-
January 23, 2020: first Operation LASER planning meeting [ref]
-
March 2, 2020: Operation LASER officially launched
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March 4, 2020: Cabinet Committee officially announced [[ref](https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2020/03/04/prime-minister-creates-committee-covid-19)]
Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:
In Canada, the emergency declarations were made by the provinces, as follows [ref]:
-
March 13, 2020 Quebec provincial public health emergency
-
March 16, 2020 Prince Edward Island public health emergency
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March 17, 2020 British Columbia (BC) public health emergency
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March 17, 2020 Alberta provincial public health emergency
-
March 17, 2020 Ontario provincial state of emergency
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March 18, 2020 BC state of emergency under Emergency Program Act
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March 18, 2020 Saskatchewan provincial state of emergency
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March 18, 2020 Yukon public health emergency
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March 19, 2020 Northwest Territories public health emergency
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March 19, 2020 Nunavut public health emergency
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March 20, 2020 Manitoba provincial state of emergency
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March 22, 2020 Nova Scotia provincial state of emergency
Military/IC-affiliated groups involved in messaging/propaganda/censorship:
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CAF began to gather intelligence on pandemic disinformation in January 2020 [ref]
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Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC) [ref]
-
Canadian military intelligence unit - Precision Information Team (PiT)[ref][ref]
Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO:
Covid Dossier: Netherlands
Military/intelligence agencies and alliances involved in response:
Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:
-
March 15, 2020: “new additional measures to combat the COVID-19 outbreak” (closure of schools, restaurants, sports/fitness facilities)[ref]
-
March 23, 2020: “intelligent lockdown” announcement [ref]
Military/IC-affiliated groups involved in messaging/propaganda/censorship:
-
Ministry of Defense Land Information Manoeuvre Centre (LIMC) [ref][ref][ref][ref]
-
National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV)[ref]
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National Core Team Crisis Communication (NKC) (led by the NCTV)[ref]
-
Interdepartmental Working Group on Disinformation (includes Defense, Foreign Affairs and Justice Departments, among others) [ref]
Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, NATO, EU:
Covid Dossier: Germany
Military/intelligence agencies, committees, and groups involved in response & dates they were announced
-
February 27/28: Corona Crisis Team (Corona-Krisenstab) [ref] led by Ministry of Health and Ministry of the Interior (equivalent of DHS + DOJ) [ref]
-
November 2021: new Crisis Team for vaccines (led by military)[ref]
Key figures in Covid Response linked to NATO, UN/WHO, military, IC:
-
Bernhard Schwartländer [ref]
Covid Dossier: Italy
Although we do not yet have the full list of Italian agencies, dates, emergency declarations etc., we do have compelling evidence that NATO was involved in coordinating the Covid response in Italy:
The Italian CTS (Comitato Tecnico Scientifico, or Technical Scientific Committee) was established on February 5, 2020 “with consultancy and support competence for coordination activities to overcome the epidemiological emergency due to the spread of Coronavirus.” https://www.salute.gov.it/portale/nuovocoronavirus/dettaglioContenutiNuovoCoronavirus.jsp?area=nuovoCoronavirus&id=5432&lingua=italiano&menu=vuoto
Note the date as it relates to the events of February 4, 2020 (described in the Executive Summary above). Remember that on February 5, 2020 nobody in Italy had been diagnosed with or died from the coronavirus. In the entire world, a few hundred deaths were attributed to the virus.
Minutes of a CTS meeting held on March 5, 2020, obtained through FOIA [ref], include statements by General Bonfiglio [ref], identified as belonging to the “NATO UEO point of the DPC.” [ref]
Below is a screenshot of the minutes in Italian, followed by English translation:
[
Gen. Bonfiglio, NATO WEU Point of the Department of Civil Defense, is invited and reminds of the commitments regarding the handling of confidential documentation that must be subject to the rules of restricted external communication and dissemination.
Gen. Bonfiglio recalls Law 124/2007 emphasizing that the transmission of documents produced in CTS (Scientific Technical Committee) will henceforth be done through the NATO WEU Point of the Department of Civil Defense and the Ministry of Health.
Covid Dossier: military/intelligence/biodefense plans & alliances
The following plans and alliances provide frameworks for responding to a bioterror/bioweapons attack. The information provided in this Dossier suggests they may have been invoked in the global Covid response.
-
U.S. Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Response (9/9/2016) This publication provides joint doctrine for military domestic or international response to minimize the effects of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear incident. [ref]
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Medical Countermeasures Consortium - a four-nation partnership involving the Defence and Health Departments of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.[ref]
-
Quadripartite Medical Intelligence Committee (QMIC) the health equivalent of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance [ref]
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NATO - Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defence Centre of Excellence [ref]
-
EU - Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) [ref]
Covid Dossier: Recommended reading for historical, economic, political and sociological context
Toby Green and Thomas Fazi. The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and The Poor – A Critique from the Left. C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2023.
C.J. Hopkins. The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021). Consent Factory Publishing, 2022.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. Skyhorse Publishing, 2023.
Unlimited Hangout investigative series: Moderna’s “Hail Mary”
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged and illustrated edition, 1972. (out of print; used copies available)
I would like a bit of a break from the military covid op. I am sick of it, I hate it, I despise those who are responsible and those who blindly obeyed, as well as those who keep obeying and keep staying willfully blind. I hate writing about it. I want to write about people I admire and not about the ones I hate.
I previously wrote about Nikolai Kozyrev, a Russian physicist who proposed a revolutionary theory of Time as the source of energy in the stars and all bodies in our World:
This is Part 2 of the story, largely focusing on Kozyrev’s biography.
Kozyrev’s Selected Works is a book in Russian available in scanned image format at Ana’s Archive. It contains his most important papers on astrophysics and his own theory of causal mechanics, including experimental work and detailed astronomical, geological and atmospheric observations. The book was published by the Leningrad University Press in 1991.
I tried and failed to find an English translation, and I don’t think a full version of this book is available in English. However, I found Kozyrev’s biography translated into English, abridged included in a science journal article. The English translation is very awkward and some IMO very important information about the history of the repressions against scientists in the 30’s by Stalin’s regime is omitted. For most of this post I made my own translations from the chapter on Kozyrev’s biography by his one-time colleague Dadaev published in this book.
Due Diligence and Art is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Kozyrev’s life story is both tragic and astonishing.
Nikolai Kozyrev was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on September 2 (20), 1908 in the family of Alexander Kozyrev, a geologist who worked at the Ministry of Agriculture. Kozyrev senior came from a family of Russian peasants from the city of Bugulma, Samara province, but ultimately attained an administrative rank in the Russian imperial government giving him the rights of nobility. Note: my non-Russian, Tatar part of the family are also from Bugulma. Kozyrev’s mother, Yulia Nikolaevna was from the family of a merchant, Shihobalov.
Kozyrev graduated from the secondary school in 1924 and initially entered the pedagogical institute, but, with urging from his professors, transferred to studying astrophysics at the Leningrad University, where he completed his studies in 1928. He then began working at the Pulkovo Observatory (later became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences) as a postgraduate student. At Pulkovo he became friends with two other postgraduate students - V.A. Ambartsumian and D.I. Eropkin.
“The Trio” became memorable at Pulkovo due to their outstanding abilities, original early scientific publications, but also due to their rebellion against the bureaucratic administration which was being unrolled throughout Soviet academia during the 1920’s-30’s. The new regime’s objective was to eliminate any traces of self-governance in academia, such as replacement of the leadership previously elected by scientific peers with the Communist Party-appointed administrators. These changes were not in favor of any independent thinkers.
Kozyrev’s early publications included articles on spectrometry-based measurements of the temperature of solar flares and solar spots. He demonstrated that there should be a radial equilibrium within the solar spots, and that the spots are located deeper in the solar atmosphere than had been previously thought. In 1934, Kozyrev published a paper on radial equilibrium and extended photosphere of the stars in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (London). In the same issue of Notices, albeit with data published six months later than Kozyrev’s, S. Chandrasekhar proposed a more generalized theory. The theory became known as Kozyrev-Chandrasekhar.
Note that today it is hard to find a mention of Kozyrev’s work in the archives of Chandrasekhar (on the University of Chicago’s page dedicated to Chandrasekhar’s work, Kozyrev’s name is only mentioned in the photo collection).
Kozyrev maintained scientific collaboration with his friend Eropkin who was focused on the areas of geophysics. They jointly undertook several expeditions to perform spectrographic measurements of the polar lights. However, their work repeatedly ran into administrative obstacles, staffing intrigues and conflicts. In 1936 they were falsely accused of misusing funds for the expeditions. The false accusations were used to dismiss the scientists from Pulkovo and start a court case against them. The case was dismissed in 1936 with the court even issuing a reprimand to the administration of Pulkovo for “poor staff relations”. Kozyrev and Eropkin had to file a countersuit to get reinstated as employees at Pulkovo, and administrative court struggles continued for almost a year.
In the meantime, in October, 1936, in Leningrad, arrests of scientists had begun. One of the first to be arrested was the corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Boris V. Numerov (1891–1941), the director of the Astronomical Institute, an outstanding scientist in the field of astronomy and geodesy. He was accused of being the organizer of a terrorist anti-Soviet group amongst intellectuals. The wave of arrests reached Pulkovo. Kozyrev was arrested on the evening of the 19th anniversary of October revolution. On the night of December 5th (Day of the Stalin’s Constitution, the “most democratic in the world”) his friend Eropkin was arrested in Leningrad.
The wave of arrests and execution of scientists based on undisclosed accusations continued without any apparent logic - a new head of department would be arrested weeks after the previous head of the department was sent to political prison and/or executed. The full set of charges against 100+ scientists arrested in 1936-1937 in Leningrad alone was disclosed only decades later, in the late 1980’s. They were accused of being connected to a “fascist Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorist organization”, allegedly set up by the German intelligence forces in 1932 with an objective of overthrowing the Soviet regime. This formulation of the charges became available from declassified KGB documentation in 1989.
The Pulkovo astronomers, arrested between November and the following February, were tried in Leningrad on May 25, 1937. Most were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, removal of civil rights for 5 additional years, and confiscation of all assets. The “trial” for each political prisoner lasted several minutes, without disclosure of charges, without defense representation, and only accepting “confessions of the accused” - confessions obtained by torture. Executions by firing squad for many followed later in the day of the trial.
According to the Soviet legal codes at the time, the 10 year imprisonment term was the maximum, beyond which was only execution. However, almost all political prisoners died or were executed before the expiry of their sentences.
Of all arrested and condemned Pulkovo scientists, only Kozyrev survived. Kozyrev’s friend Eropkin was executed along with many others. Many executions were performed in prisons by “special tribunals” without even nominal court sanctions. It is not possible to know the fate of many people who perished in the repressions. Death certificates, issued in 1956 to the families of the rehabilitated can hardly be considered reliable. As an example, one listed cause of death as “diabetes” for the same person listed as executed at the prison camp in the declassified KGB documentation.
While it was at some time proposed that Kozyrev was targeted in 1936-37 due to his prior conflicts with academic administrators, this was unlikely. The scope of the repressions was a much broader, and a largely indiscriminate operation. The repressions in the late 1930’s by Stalin’s regime implemented by the NKVD (predecessor to KGB) was designed to suppress any possible political opposition and especially target the “intellectual class”. Later disclosures, including by the Khrushev’s government, revealed that the repressions had been pre-planned in advance, with pre-manufactured scenarios of “terrorist plots”, accusations and plans of imprisonment/execution.
Note: if you think this totalitarian horror is only possible under a communist regime, this approach is very similar to the arrests of the J6 “insurrectionists” on made-up terrorism charges, or intense prosecution and lawfare against doctors who are trying to treat their patients during the DOD-faked “covid pandemic”, or scientists who do not want to participate in fraud - the standard approach of fabricating plots by the national security-intelligence apparatus for political aims. Apparently, every aspiring totalitarian deep state shares the same playbook:
Parents Catch FBI In Plot To Force Mentally Ill Son To Be A Right Wing Terrorist.
If you think the NKVD invented this, they didn’t. The tactic to set up “terrorist plots and sleeper cells of radicals” and then “foil their evil plans” to “protect” the public with ever increasing totalitarian control measures and the upward extraction of wealth was used by the tsarist Russia, and by many governments prior to that.
Specifically, the Leningrad bureau of NKVD dreamed up “terrorist cells” of “organized intellectuals” conspiring to overthrow the Soviet government and fabricated dossiers for the closed-door prosecution. Decades later, the farfetchedness of those materials was plainly obvious. But back then the atmosphere of the top-down terror incentivized snitching and witch hunts.
The imaginary rosters of the subversive organizations were created by the NKVD by going through the university HR records and identifying plausible targets to paint as a conspiracist - typically because the target came from a middle or upper class (deemed hostile to the proletariat by default), although that wasn’t strictly necessary. Any pretext to assign membership in the fictional counter-revolutionary organization was utilized. Another widely used pretext was an accusation of international espionage, which was quite easy because all Pulkovo scientists routinely corresponded with their academic colleagues in other countries. Thus the fictional “terrorist organization” was fabricated. Subsequently its “discovery and elimination” was implemented by beating out false confessions and false witness statements from the accused in order to provide convictions and further credence to the entire repression scheme.
Kozyrev was lucky to survive. Later in life he was reluctant to discuss his time in prison and in labor camps, although some parts of his memories were included in Solzhenytsyn’s GULAG Archipelago, and several works by other authors.
Some episodes of the prison and camp life of Kozyrev are very important to understanding of his subsequent scientific work. One episode concerns the textbook Course of Astrophysics and Stellar Astronomy (published by Pulkovo Observatory, 1934-36). While being held in prison, Kozyrev continued thinking about his scientific research in theoretical physics, specifically about the question of the source of stellar energy. He was stumped because he needed data about certain types of stars - data that he knew were contained in the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics. Kozyrev’s cellmate was sent to the solitary confinement for five days and upon return was so mentally and physically damaged that he died shortly afterwards. Kozyrev was then left alone in his cell, clinging to shreds of sanity himself by intensely thinking about cosmos. And one day, mysteriously, the exact book that he desperately needed, the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics was pushed through the observation port of his cell door by an unknown person.
By different accounts, Kozyrev used the book between one and three days, scanning through it and memorizing the data. Then the book was noticed by a prison guard and taken away. Until the end of his life Kozyrev thought that the book was from the prison library, but the way it appeared in his cell was “it fell from heavens”. However it is very unlikely that the exact volume of a highly specialized, small-circulation science textbook would have been found in a prison library. It is more likely that someone delivered it. It is also possible that under conditions of physical and mental deprivation, Kozyrev drew the necessary data from his memory, and may have had a dream/delirium about the book appearing in the cell.
Another known episode describes that once consumed by his thoughts, Kozyrev began to pace his prison cell. This was forbidden: during the day the prisoners were required to sit on a stool, and at night lie on the bunk. For this infringement he was sent to the solitary confinement for five days, during February. The temperature in the confinement cell was about zero degrees Celsius, and the prisoners were left barefooted, in underwear only. The daily meal contained a piece of bread and a mug of hot water. With the mug it was possible to briefly warm one’s freezing hands but not the body. Kozyrev began to pray to God. He recalled that after some time of intense prayer he began to feel internal warmth, and thus was able to survive the 5 or even 6 days of the freezing hell.
Later in life Kozyrev tried to figure out how the internal heat could have been generated, and noted in his theoretical works that people have an ability to survive for long periods of time without food, “sustained by the Holy Spirit”. What is the Holy Spirit? If He is the source of energy then energy can appear through Him in any natural body, whether a man, or a star, or a planet. What universal source can generate the energy? Twenty years later Kozyrev advanced these ideas in his theory of Time as the source of energy in our World.
Until May 1939, Kozyrev was in prison, then afterwards he was sent into the Norilsk labor camps. Being sent to labor camps might have saved Kozyrev’s life, as due to the war and shortage of qualified engineers, he became a needed specialist in mining and geology. In 1940 he was sent to the Dudinsky Permafrost Station as a geodesist. He was allowed to work unguarded as there was no possibility of escape anyway: he was surrounded by hundreds of miles of the frozen tundra.
On October 25, 1941, “for engaging in hostile counter-revolutionary propaganda amongst the prisoners” he was again arrested, and sentenced to death.
What kind of “counter-revolutionary propaganda” was considered grave enough to warrant the death penalty? Kozyrev recalled several official charges: 1) that he thought the theory of expanding universe was valid; 2) he thought that Esenin was a good poet and that Dunaevsky was a bad music composer; 3) during a fight in the barracks he declared that social being does not determine the consciousness (i.e. disagreed with Karl Marx); 4) he also disagreed with Friedrich Engels calling Isaac Newton “an inductive ass”. Regarding the last point, the accused was argumentative and said “I have not read Engels, but I believe Newton is one of the greatest scientists of all time”.
Therefore, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Russia reconsidered Kozyrev’s previous sentence as too liberal and replaced it with the death penalty. However, the warden of the Noril-Lag (part of the GULAG) tore up the order of execution in front of Kozyrev, saying that the regional center didn’t have any firing squads. In reality, Kozyrev was needed, as an expert, for the building of a copper-nickel mining facility, as the only other nickel mine near the Finnish border was then located behind the WWII front line. He worked as the superintendent for geology and prospecting expeditions until March of 1945.
In August 1944, a petition asking specifically for liberation of Kozyrev was sent to the Minister of Internal Affairs, signed by three members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Vavilov, Shayn, and Mihailov. What can explain this? In 1943, the Soviet intelligence agencies received the information about the creation of nuclear weapons by the USA and realized they needed to enter the nuclear race. Many Soviet physicists were in custody at the time. Many were already dead. It became a matter of urgency to return those who were still alive in prison camps, however, the question remains as to how the 3 academicians who supposedly signed the petition knew that Kozyrev was still alive? In addition, the judicial revision was almost inconceivable back then. The decisions of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR had never been reconsidered.
The process of reconsidering his sentence took 18 months, and a key role was played by inspector N. A. Bogomolov (Note: interestingly, the name means “praying to God”) who was brave enough to conclude that there had been no basis to charge Kozyrev with a crime of treason in the first place. This was a dangerous position to take, as this opened the door to revise the convictions of all other scientists swept up in Stalin’s repressions. According to Kozyrev himself, the deciding factor at the end of the investigation was the question posed by the inspector “Do you believe in God?”, to which Kozyrev replied “yes”. Afterwards he found out that the inspector took this as the verification of his honesty answering all other questions of the investigation. This is indeed shocking, considering that professing religious beliefs and taking them as evidence of honesty at the time would have been the reason for another imprisonment or a death sentence for both Kozyrev and Bogomolov.
Kozyrev was liberated “conditionally ahead of schedule” by a special meeting of the KGB on December 14, 1946. This meant that with the slightest pretext he could be behind bars again. He was finally cleared of all charges only by February 21, 1958.
Kozyrev was invited by academician Shayn to work at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, then under construction. He accepted, but first he went to Leningrad to complete his yet unfinished doctoral thesis, the defense of which took place at the Leningrad University on March 10th, 1947, i.e. only about 3 months after his return from labor camps. Many colleagues were surprised: when did he write the dissertation? Apparently, he had composed the dissertation during his ten years in prison. By some accounts he carried it all in his head, although by other accounts, including that of his son, there was a rough draft in a notebook that he carried sewn into his clothes. Some pages from it were seen photographed and presented upside-down at an exhibit dedicated to his work shortly after his death (in order to not attract too much attention to the still prohibited topic of discussion), but the whereabouts of the notebook today are unknown. Still, it is a long way from a rough draft to a finished dissertation. In addition, how would one keep abreast of the scientific literature published during a decade of imprisonment?
His colleague Dadaev, who was present at the defense of the dissertation, and many years later researched and wrote up his biography, explained that Kozyrev had an incredible ability to review scientific literature. The library at Pulkovo was producing a biweekly exhibit of all newly arrived scientific literature, typically containing 100+ papers and books. He would review all of it in a couple of hours, zeroing in on precisely what he needed and without making any notes, as if he knew upfront who would produce anything worthwhile. Another reason noted by Dadaev as an explanation to how the dissertation was accomplished - Kozyrev’s work was so fundamental and so original that not much in science had changed to influence it one way or another during his decade in prison. In fact, this last point remains the same and perhaps even more true today. What 10 years? The major works of art as all original thinking are timeless: they transcend centuries as if they are but brief moments.
Dadaev wrote:
Defense of the dissertation occurred at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad University: the dissertation was titled “Sources of Stellar Energy and the Theory of the Internal Structure of Stars”. […]I was permitted to be present at this defense. Discussion was rather animated, because […] Kozyrev put forward a new idea as to the source of the stellar energy, subverting the already widespread conviction that thermonuclear reactions are the source of energy in the entrails of stars.
The Academic Council of the University awarded Kozyrev the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Kozyrev’s dissertation was published in two parts, in the Proceedings of the Crimean Astrophysics Observatory in 1948 (part I), and in 1951 (part II).
Kozyrev’s dissertation proposed a radically different view on the internal processes of the stars, arguing that the stars are not nuclear reactors but rather machines that convert yet unknown energy - the energy of time - into radiation. The stellar “machines” are extremely efficient as they barely consume any of their own material for production of massive amounts of energy, contradicting the conventionally accepted theory of nuclear fusion as the source of the stellar energy. Later on confirmations of his theory came from, e.g., the failure to detect neutrino streams from the Sun and additionally from detection of the solar 160 min pulses or oscillations, measured by academician A.B. Severny and several other independent scientists, including by Stanford Observatory in the 70’s. Subsequently, similar oscillations were found for the Earth magnetosphere and ionosphere and for some stars and star clusters. Yet, today the internet search engines will proclaim that this finding is controversial and “unconfirmed” because it threatens the mainstream failed dogma of stars as nuclear furnaces and the fake Climate Change models that use these assumptions.
Kozyrev planned to write the third part of his dissertation, investigating further the source of the solar energy, however it was never completed. He produced an enormous research output making major discoveries about the geological and atmospheric properties of Venus, Mars and the Moon. In august 1958, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union gathered in Moscow. Kozyrev’s “Causal Mechanics” paper was published for this event, describing the principles of his theory of time as the source of non-nuclear stellar energy. This work provided a fundamentally different view of the universal forces of nature, of life itself, acting simultaneously everywhere, defying the thermal death and giving us the World that, quoting Kozyrev “sparkles afresh, renewed each day”.
Also in 1958 Kozyrev was able to observe and capture a volcanic plume on the Moon and published a short letter in The Astronomical Circular (No. 197, 1958) as well as an article containing the description of his methods, with a reproduction of the unique spectrogram, in Sky and Telescope (vol. 18, No. 4, 1959). In response to this article the famous astronomer and planetologist, Gerard Kuiper, sent a letter to the Director of Pulkovo Observatory in which he declared that Kozyrev’s spectrogram was a fake. This resulted in years of ruffled feathers in international science circles, as the dogma of the Moon as a “geologically dead body” was “settled science” back then. To give credit to Kuiper, when presented with more information, he withdrew his claims of forgery. Ultimately, in 1969 Kozyrev’s discovery of Lunar volcanism was awarded the gold medal from the International Academy of Astronautics. The discovery that the Moon is not a “dead body” but has evidence of ongoing tectonics has been confirmed by independent observations. It is also claimed that Apollo missions brought back volcanic soil samples, and this forced the change of minds in the international science circles.
I am almost certain that NASA’s Moon landings were faked, so the question is - why did they decide to “confirm” Kozyrev’s discovery and even give him the prestigious medal? My guess is that there was too much other data pointing to the same thing - ongoing tectonic activity on the Moon. The Moon is the closest celestial body, and as the imaging technologies were becoming more powerful. Denying the tectonics would not be a smart idea for NASA in the long run. Tectonic activity on the Moon is consistent with Kozyrev’s theory that celestial bodies, just as everything else present in nature, are alive, continuously drawing the energy from the flow of time.
In December 1969, the State Committee for Affairs of Discovery and Inventions of the USSR awarded Kozyrev the diploma for discovery for “tectonic activity of the Moon”. Despite the conferring of the medal and the diploma, the question of a non-nuclear stellar energy source was not acknowledged. While nominally respected, Kozyrev’s work was systematically sidelined and ignored. After some positive popular press appeared discussing Kozyrev’s theory of time by highly respected science writers, an academic committee was called to review and debate his discoveries. All were systematically shot down as “unconfirmed theories”. I am not a physicist or mathematician, but I do have extensive experience commercializing modern academic intellectual property. From what I have seen of Kozyrev’s papers - the experiments, observational work and theoretical reasoning are exceptionally thorough, lightyears ahead of the nonsense that gets Nobel Prizes today. Kozyrev did not get any official support, even for making the equipment necessary for his experiments. He was forced to work alone, and the only help in mechanical engineering he received was from a volunteer, engineer Nasonov, who one day showed up in Kozyrev’s lab and continued working for him, making lab tools. Nasonov worked evenings and weekends after his primary job at a manufacturing plant, without any pay, and took his own vacation time to accompany Kozyrev to the Crimean Observatory.
The two developed some successful experimental equipment, such as gyroscopic scales to study irreversible natural processes - melting of the snow, heating and cooling of copper wire, evaporation of liquids and fading of the plants.
Kozyrev repeatedly tried to get the attention of the academia to his research and discoveries, some truly unprecedented. For example, he was able to detect the effects of the solar and lunar eclipses on Earth without leaving his lab, simply using his experimental mirrors, the equipment that allowed him to shield and focus the flow of time and detect the disruptions introduced by the eclipses. He documented geological effects of the eclipses and the position of the Moon on the seismic activity on Earth. All of these discoveries fell on deaf ears. The establishment academia remained uninterested and continued treating him generally as a nuisance and a heretic. Ultimately, by 1979 he was forced into retirement that he did not want but had no choice as he would be left without any income otherwise. He died in 1983, aged almost 75.
Kozyrev was not able to complete his theory of causal mechanics, to which he dedicated nearly 40 years of his life. During his life, American probes Voyager-1 and -2 (1979) registered 8 active volcanos on Jupiter’s satellite Io, confirming Kozyrev’s position on wide spread active tectonic activity in the universe, even in the smaller bodies that were deemed too small to have it under prevailing physical theories. He was not recognized for this and other discoveries that he predicted. Nobody seemed to be interested in researching the nature of the “inconvenient” volcanism of smaller celestial bodies then or now - and no wonder! Observations like these defy the prevailing geological theories that are now being used to concoct the Climate Change narratives.
He worked most of his life, alone, with little support. His theory of time remains unfinished because he simply ran out of it.
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
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.
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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.
How much wild nature do we need and do we really understand how it functions?
As the New Year 2025 opens its horizons, please allow me to offer a few thoughts for discussion. The concept of biotic regulation provides a distinct perspective on why we need wilderness. There is the carbon-centric view: we believe that we need trees to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Strictly speaking, this view is not about wilderness or nature at all, because its logical extension is to cut down trees (understood as “carbon sticks”) and bury or burn them to make room for new sticks.
Another view is that we need wilderness to maintain biodiversity, the number of species on Earth. This view has its own controversies. If you take boreal and temperate forests, for example, they don’t have as many species as tropical forests. We can safely conserve all of their species locally, say, in Scandinavia. Does that mean that the remaining wilderness in the boreal forests doesn’t need to be protected?
The proposition stemming from the biotic regulation concept is that we need to protect natural self-sustaining ecosystems in an area sufficient for them to perform their climate-regulating function on a regional and global scale. That is to say, we should not protect wild nature as an ecological museum. We should protect wild nature as a working mechanism for climate stabilization. It is important to note that since we do not quite understand how the climate system works, we must assume that natural ecosystems will work most efficiently when left without our intervention. We can in no way improve their functioning.
To visualize this idea, imagine that the Earth can have several climate states, not all of which are equally favorable to modern life. With environmental regulation by natural ecosystems, the Earth sits comfortably around 15 degrees Celsius as a global average surface temperature. There is a safe potential pit in this temperature range.
As we disrupt natural ecosystems and impair their climate regulation function, the pit becomes shallower and eventually disappears. If we also add CO2, which pushes the Earth toward a warmer state, we could see a sharp and unfavorable increase in global average surface temperature.
The scenario shown in the above two graphs is certainly radical*, but it conveys the concept of why we need wilderness, and how much of it. We need enough wilderness to provide sufficient stability for all the environmental parameters we care about. In simple words, to ensure that the potential pit of our existence is comfortably deep and favorably situated in the parameter space. (E.g., precipitation in a desert can be stably near zero, but this is not the type of stability that we would appreciate.)
Of course, it is not just about temperature and precipitation. It is, in the words of Chuck Pezeshki, an ultra complex multidimensional optimization problem. Natural ecosystems simultaneously optimize biological productivity, temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloud cover, continental moisture transport, soil moisture, nitrogen, phosphorus and other critically important biogens, and they also stabilize themselves against internal disruptions (like deadly insect outbreaks).
This last aspect provides clues to the priorities of protection. All ecosystems that are still capable of self-regeneration must be protected from our exploitation as much as possible. Stop taking from them. They are our gold standard, our ultimate treasure. Efforts to define this important concept of ecosystem self-sustainability, for which we do not even have a suitable expression, are ongoing. We hear about stable forests and high-integrity forests, and in terms of strategies, the outstanding concept of proforestation has recently been formulated. To this intellectual quest, the biotic regulation concept adds the perspective of scale: we need natural ecosystems to do their job of regulating the climate massively around the globe.
So why is protecting natural ecosystems not a major focus of climate negotiations? One reason for our archaically primitive views on ecosystem functioning is that our ecological knowledge is heavily biased toward systems that are severely disturbed by human activity. Such systems are inherently unstable themselves and obviously do not stabilize the environment and climate.
Let us have a look. The graph below depicts the extant intact forests that show no sign of human interference during the satellite era. For what they are worth, these are our proxies for natural self-sustainable forests.
The second graph shows the distribution of flux towers that measure important atmospheric processes and parameters including evaporation, transpiration and transport of tracers like CO2 or biogenic aerosols.
We can see that the vast majority of measurements (translated into the vast majority of publications and the vast majority of students doing their Phd theses about) are made outside the regions occupied by natural forests in areas profoundly transformed (degraded) by anthropogenic activities. I would like to highlight one of the very few points in Siberia (Zotino, the red dot), which Andrei Nefiodov and I visited in 2020. This flux tower is situated in an area surrounded by secondary forests disturbed by clearcuts and legacy fires (see this paper about legacy fires and this one about fire-related landscape traps). Here is a typical view of forests surrounding the tower:
Compare this to an undisturbed boreal forest:
(Photo courtesy of Alexei Aleinikov, the forest did not burn for several hundred (!) years).
The third map below is from a recent global study of ecosystem resilience. It speaks for itself. We do not study natural, self-sustainable, resilient ecosystems. We have excluded them from consideration.
It is like if some aliens were studying human health, and the very capacity of humans as living beings, from inside a big hospital. After studying the patients suffering from various serious diseases, the aliens would conclude that humans are fragile creatures totally dependent on the external supply of medicine and intellectually quite uneventful. They would hardly figure out that humans are able to discover the laws of nature and perform ambitious environmental transformations on their basis. They could deduce very little about the human capacity to create art and would not believe that the best of classical music could have been composed by those strangely morbid apes. Indeed, when we are ill or humiliated, we are far from our best.
Unfortunately, our knowledge about natural ecosystems is similarly heavily distorted. We greatly underappreciate them. Historically, our misconceptions about how natural ecosystems work are so deeply ingrained that we don’t even recognize, let alone understand the importance of, the counter-evidence when by any chance we do stumble upon it. I’ll discuss some conspicuous examples on another occasion. (In passing, I note that seeing the truth in this chaos requires a viewpoint from outside this chaos. Lovelock had such a viewpoint of a space scientist. Gorshkov had such a viewpoint of an outstanding theoretical physicist who additionally spent years in untouched wilderness.)
Here I would like to conclude by listing three goals that I consider worthy of discussion and implementation:
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Elevate protection of the remaining self-sustainable natural ecosystems, on land and in the ocean, to a top priority in the international climate change mitigation agenda.
If we lose their climate-regulating potential, we are doomed to a global environmental collapse even under the “zero emissions” scenario.
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Restore biological productivity on degraded lands, to lessen the anthropogenic pressure on the remaining self-sustainable natural ecosystems.
The climate-regulating potential of the ecosystem cannot be maximized simultaneously with its economic potential. The ecosystem resources expropriated by humans are diverted from the regulatory processes that become less and less effective.
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Launch a focused global effort to study the climate-regulating potential of natural ecosystems including
- soil carbon dynamics
- ecosystem impact on, and control of, cloud cover
- ecosystem impact on, and control of, local temperature regime
*ecosystem mediation of the atmospheric moisture transport as dependent on the degree of ecosystem disturbance.
- Recognize ecosystem disturbance as a key dimension in the studies of biota-environment interactions. Quantify salient differences in environmental responses of intact versus managed (disturbed, exploited) ecosystems.
To summarize, natural ecosystems are powerful mechanisms of climate stabilization. If we exploit them more, their regulatory function is impaired adding to climate destabilization, including water cycle calamities. Curbing the on-going exploitation of natural ecosystems is feasible and represents a vital part of strategies to mitigate global change.
Words make sense only within the framework of their language. If a language dies, words lose their meaning. In the four-billion-year journey of Life, our civilization is a new word, and wild nature is the primordial language. If we lose our ground base — the wild nature, our civilization will become a chimera, a sand castle that will not last long.
* For interested readers, I discussed how these stability graphs relate to the planetary boundaries in my recent talk at the EcoSummit “Eco-Civilization for Sustainable and Desirable Future” in China (slides here).
A short intro into biotic regulation
Much of what we know today about forests was already known to our ancestors in the distant past. Forests are sources of food and medicine; they provide wood for building and heating homes. Modern people understand these forest functions equally well – they are part of our economy and commerce. However, with the development of science, people received fundamentally new and extremely important information about the forest. This new information is now also gradually becoming common knowledge, but it still has a long way to go.
First, it turned out that forests and other natural ecosystems impose a huge impact on the global environment and climate in comparison with processes in inanimate nature. One of the first to pay close attention to this at the beginning of the last century was a Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. According to Vernadsky, living organisms are a “huge geological force” (or indeed “the geological force”) that determines the conditions of their own existence in the biosphere (Vernadsky 1998).
Estimates of life’s huge environmental impact first outlined by Vernadsky were later confirmed by international scientific teams using modern methods of studying the Earth, including satellite data. For example, it was found that terrestrial ecosystems, mostly forests, are responsible for the major part of evaporation on land (Jasechko et al. 2013)[1]. Total solar power used by terrestrial vegetation for transpiration exceeds the power of modern civilization by more than a hundred times (Gorshkov 1995).
In the general case, a huge impact can be constructive or destructive, stabilizing or destabilizing. However it was found that natural ecosystems interact with their environment in a non-random way. A Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist Victor Gorshkov analyzed the available multidisciplinary evidence related to the life-environment interaction (from geochemistry to genetics and ecology) and concluded that they have only one non-controversial explanation: the biotic regulation of the environment. Natural ecosystems regulate the environment maintaining it in a state favorable for life (Gorshkov 1995).
The opposing processes of synthesis and decomposition of organic matter serve as the two levers of biotic regulation. Plants synthesize organic matter; all the other organisms (bacteria, fungi, animals) decompose it. Owing to the huge global power of these processes, even a small imbalance between the rates of biochemical synthesis and decomposition could have destroyed life-compatible conditions on Earth in a very short time. For example, the store of inorganic carbon (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, which is of the order of 1000 Gigaton C (1 Gigaton is equal to one billion ton), could have been changed by the biota by 100% in just ten years, because the rate of global synthesis and decomposition are of the order of 100 Gigaton C per year.
However, the atmospheric CO2 concentration has retained its order of magnitude over tens and hundred million years! This means that natural ecosystems have the capacity to maintain this concentration in a suitable for life state compensating deviations from the optimum. In other words, to keep the atmospheric composition stable, the synthesis and decomposition of organic matter must be strictly controlled by the natural biota.
Gorshkov (1995) made a crucial inference that, if the biota is monitoring and synchronizing powerful biogeochemical fluxes on a short term, then it must be exerting a strong compensatory reaction on the modern anthropogenic disturbance of the global carbon cycle. This conclusion is distinct from the implications of the Gaia hypothesis, which implied that the stabilizing biotic impacts are pronounced on a geological timescale and could be “extremely slow compared with current human concerns” (Lovelock 1986). The Gaia hypothesis recognized that the destruction of (some) natural ecosystems could impair the planetary homeostasis. But it did not recognize that the remaining natural ecosystems exert a strong compensatory response to the anthropogenic environmental perturbations. Neglecting this response gives rise to a misleading conclusion that some ecosystems, like boreal forests, may not be indispensable for the planetary wellbeing.
The biotic regulation concept draws a fundamental distinction between ecosystems that retain their climate-regulating function and those that have been disturbed beyond their sustainability threshold and have lost the climate-regulating capacity. This distinction has enabled Gorshkov (1995) to solve the so-called “missing sink” enigma long before this solution was recognized in the mainstream literature (Popkin 2015). The conventional view in ecology had been that natural ecosystems function on the basis of closed biogeochemical cycles (Odum 1969) and can only increase their productivity if the concentration of a limiting nutrient increases. Since terrestrial ecosystems are known to be limited by nitrogen and phosphorus (this knowledge comes from agriculture), no one could have expected that undisturbed forests could increase their productivity and ensure a CO2 sink in response to the rising CO2 concentrations. Why should they? How could they, if there is no matching rise in nitrogen and phosphorus? Finally, even if there were an increase in synthesis, why would not there be a matching increase in the decomposition – especially as the soils are warming and metabolic rates of bacteria and fungi increase?
Therefore, when atmospheric measurements became sufficiently precise to enable an accurate assessment of the global carbon cycle, and it was found that the known sources and sinks do not match, and there is a large missing sink of an unknown nature, there has been a persistent resistance from the ecological and Earth Science communities to ultimately admitting that this sink is mostly ensured by natural forests (Popkin 2015; Makarieva et al. 2023a).
Within the biotic regulation this response was straightforwardly predictable. Natural ecosystems must react to the excessive atmospheric carbon by removing it from the atmosphere and storing it in an inactive organic form. As there is no comparable increase in nitrogen and phosphorus, the excessive carbon should be removed as carbohydrates that do not contain nitrogen and phosphorus (Gorshkov 1986). But only those ecosystems that remain sufficiently intact (least disturbed) should be able to perform such a stabilizing response. Other ecosystems like arable lands should be a source of carbon as their regulatory mechanism has been broken. This is exactly how the changes in the global carbon cycle look like: there is a sink ensured by relatively intact forests (and oceanic ecosystems) and a source from land use and net deforestation (Gorshkov 1995).
Therefore, one can view the anthropogenic disturbance of the global carbon cycle as a planetary-scale experiment that has confirmed the biotic regulation predictions. This has been a very costly experiment for our planet. Its results should be thought through very seriously and practical conclusions made. Carbon is a major life-important environmental constituent, but it is not the only one. Water is a key factor enabling life on land. Thus, as they have been able to regulate carbon, natural terrestrial ecosystems should also be able to regulate the water cycle. This regulation has two aspects: one is the regulation of the cloud cover and another is the regulation of the atmospheric moisture transport.
Recent research has revealed that natural forests possess a strong capacity to modify the cloud cover and moisture transport and stabilize the water cycle (e.g., O’Connor et al. 2021; Cerasoli et al. 2021; Duveiller et al. 2021; Makarieva et al. 2023b). We now know, as did Vernadsky in the beginning of the twentieth century that ecosystems do impose a huge impact on the Earth’s cloud cover and atmospheric circulation – i.e., those very factors that are recognized as the biggest source of uncertainty in current climate models (Zelinka et al. 2020). It will take more time until the stabilizing nature of these impacts will be demonstrated in precise quantitative terms as it has been demonstrated for the carbon cycle. We can wait until the corresponding publications reach a critical mass to apply for a paradigm shift, while natural forests will continue to be destroyed. Alternatively, we can use the results of the “global carbon experiment” and make the logical inference that the natural forests must have evolved a stabilizing impact on the water aspects of climate as they have evolved it for carbon – and then take urgent measures to preserve these efficient climate regulators. This will require, in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007), “intellect, courage, vision and perseverance”.
As soon as we stand on the position that natural forest have evolved to regulate climate, we immediately recognize that this climate-regulating capacity cannot be maximized alongside commercial uses. Why? Maximum wood production is not compatible with complex natural selection criteria under which the life-supporting forest-climate homeostasis evolved. Beyond a critical disturbance, forests become unable to stabilize climate and bring water on land via the biotic pump. Plantations and forests disturbed by logging are more prone to fire and contribute to landscape drying, not wetting (Laurance & Useche 2009; Bradley et al. 2016; Oliveira et al. 2021; Lindenmayer et al. 2022; Wolf et al. 2023).
A specific and sufficient network of intact natural forests must be exempted from ongoing exploitation to prioritize their evolved climate-regulating function and bring water to land. There is irreplaceable value in forests that still possess their climate-regulating capacity (now, or in the relatively near future). Natural forests fully restore their climate-regulating function during ecological succession, which takes more than a century (i.e. several lifespans of tree species). In the current climate emergency, losing existing natural forests’ climate-regulation is irrevocable.
Self-grown forests with substantial time since the last large-scale disturbance (old and old-growth forests), are primary targets for climate-stabilizing conservation while protecting other key values (proforestation, Moomaw et al. 2019). Regional, national and international cooperation is required to preserve our wellbeing and common planetary legacy of existing climate-regulating forests. Clear and unbiased interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to identify resource-production areas vs. old-growth and climate-regulating networks (Makarieva, Nefiodov & Masino 2023).
While fundamental science is being advanced, the precautionary principle should be strictly applied. Any control system increases its feedback as the perturbation grows. Therefore, as the climate destabilization deepens, the remaining natural ecosystems should be exerting an ever increasing compensatory impact per unit area. In other words, the global climate price of losing a hectare of natural forest grows as the climate situation worsens. We call for an urgent global moratorium on the exploitation of the remaining natural ecosystems.
Cited literature
Bradley, C. M., Hanson, C. T., & DellaSala, D. A. (2016). Does increased forest protection correspond to higher fire severity in frequent‐fire forests of the western United States?. Ecosphere, 7(10), e01492.
Cerasoli, S., Yin, J., and Porporato, A. (2021). Cloud cooling effects of afforestation and reforestation at midlatitudes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2026241118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026241118
Duveiller, G., Filipponi, F., Ceglar, A., Bojanowski, J., Alkama, R., and Cescatti, A. (2021). Revealing the widespread potential of forests to increase low level cloud cover. Nat. Commun. 12, 4337. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24551-5
Gorshkov, V. G. (1986). Atmospheric disturbance of the carbon cycle: impact upon the biosphere. Nuov. Cim. C 9, 937–952. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02891905
Gorshkov, V. G. (1995). Physical and biological bases of life stability: man, biota, environment. Springer Science & Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-85001-1
Jasechko, S., Sharp, Z. D., Gibson, J. J., Birks, S. J., Yi, Y., & Fawcett, P. J. (2013). Terrestrial water fluxes dominated by transpiration. Nature, 496(7445), 347-350.
Laurance, W. F., & Useche, D. C. (2009). Environmental synergisms and extinctions of tropical species. Conservation biology, 23(6), 1427-1437.
Lindenmayer, D. B., Bowd, E. J., Taylor, C., & Likens, G. E. (2022). The interactions among fire, logging, and climate change have sprung a landscape trap in Victoria’s montane ash forests. Plant Ecology, 223(7), 733-749.
Lovelock, J. E. (1986). Geophysiology: a new look at earth science. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 67(4), 392-397.
Makarieva, A. M., Nefiodov, A. V., Rammig, A., & Nobre, A. D. (2023a). Re-appraisal of the global climatic role of natural forests for improved climate projections and policies. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 6, https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1150191
Makarieva, A. M., Nefiodov, A. V., Nobre, A. D., Baudena, M., Bardi, U., Sheil, D., et al. (2023b). The role of ecosystem transpiration in creating alternate moisture regimes by influencing atmospheric moisture convergence. Glob. Change Biol. 29, 2536–2556. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16644
Makarieva, A. M., Nefiodov, A. V., Masino S. A. (2023c) How to assess and preserve the climate-regulating function of forests for local and global wellbeing. The Eastern Old-Growth Conference, Geneva Point Center, NH USA, 21-23 September 2023.
Moomaw, W. R., Masino, S. A., and Faison, E. K. (2019). Intact forests in the United States: proforestation mitigates climate change and serves the greatest good. Front. For. Glob. Change 2, 27. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2019.00027
O'Connor, J. C., Dekker, S. C., Staal, A., Tuinenburg, O. A., Rebel, K. T., and Santos, M. J. (2021). Forests buffer against variations in precipitation. Glob. Change Biol. 27, 4686–4696. doi: 10.1111/gcb.15763
Odum, E. P. (1969). The strategy of ecosystem development: an understanding of ecological succession provides a basis for resolving man's conflict with nature. Science 164, 262–270. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.164.3877.262
Oliveira, A., Sande Silva, J., Gaspar, J., Guiomar, N., & Fernandes, P. (2021). Is native forest an alternative to prevent wildfire in the WUI in Central Portugal?.
Popkin, G. (2015). The hunt for the world’s missing carbon. Nature, 523, 20-22.
Taleb, N. N. (2007). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable (Vol. 2). Random house, p. xxiii
Vernadsky, V. I. (1998). The biosphere. Springer Science & Business Media.
Wolf, J., Asch, J., Tian, F., Georgiou, K., & Ahlström, A. (2023). Canopy responses of Swedish primary and secondary forests to the 2018 drought. Environmental Research Letters, 18(6), 064044.
Zelinka, M. D., Myers, T. A., McCoy, D. T., Po-Chedley, S., Caldwell, P. M., Ceppi, P., et al. (2020). Causes of higher climate sensitivity in CMIP6 models. Geophys. Res. Lett. 47, e2019GL085782. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085782
[1] In the process of photosynthesis, the stomata of green leaves open to pick up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While the stomata are open, water vapor evaporates into the atmosphere from the internal wet milieu of the leaf. This process is called transpiration. Per each molecule of carbon dioxide fixed, several hundred water molecules can evaporate.
The foundations of the current information war were laid in response to a sequence of events that took place in 2014. First Russia tried to suppress the U.S.-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine; a few months later Russia invaded Crimea; and several months after that the Islamic State captured the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and declared it the capital of a new caliphate. In three separate conflicts, an enemy or rival power of the United States was seen to have successfully used not just military might but also social media messaging campaigns designed to confuse and demoralize its enemies—a combination known as “hybrid warfare.” These conflicts convinced U.S. and NATO security officials that the power of social media to shape public perceptions had evolved to the point where it could decide the outcome of modern wars—outcomes that might be counter to those the United States wanted. They concluded that the state had to acquire the means to take control over digital communications so that they could present reality as they wanted it to be, and prevent reality from becoming anything else.
Technically, hybrid warfare refers to an approach that combines military and non-military means—overt and covert operations mixed with cyberwarfare and influence operations—to both confuse and weaken a target while avoiding direct, full-scale conventional war. In practice, it is notoriously vague. “The term now covers every type of discernible Russian activity, from propaganda to conventional warfare, and most that exists in between,” wrote Russia analyst Michael Kofman in March 2016.
Over the past decade, Russia has indeed repeatedly employed tactics associated with hybrid warfare, including a push to target Western audiences with messaging on channels like RT and Sputnik News and with cyber operations such as the use of “troll” accounts. But this was not new even in 2014, and it was something the United States, as well as every other major power, engaged in as well. As early as 2011, the United States was building its own “troll armies” online by developing software to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”
“If you torture hybrid warfare long enough, it will tell you anything,” Kofman had admonished, which is precisely what began happening a few months later when Trump critics popularized the idea that a hidden Russian hand was the puppeteer of political developments inside the United States.
The leading voice promoting that claim was a former FBI officer and counterterrorism analyst named Clint Watts. In an article from August 2016, “How Russia Dominates Your Twitter Feed to Promote Lies (And, Trump, Too),” Watts and his co-author, Andrew Weisburd, described how Russia had revived its Cold War-era “Active Measures” campaign, using propaganda and disinformation to influence foreign audiences. As a result, according to the article, Trump voters and Russian propagandists were promoting the same stories on social media that were intended to make America look weak and incompetent. The authors made the extraordinary claim that the “melding of Russian-friendly accounts and Trumpkins has been going on for some time.” If that was true, it meant that anyone expressing support for Donald Trump might be an agent of the Russian government, whether or not the person intended to play that role. It meant that the people they called “Trumpkins,” who made up half the country, were attacking America from within. It meant that politics was now war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.
Watts made his name as a counterterrorism analyst by studying the social media strategies used by ISIS, but with articles like this, he became the media’s go-to expert on Russian trolls and Kremlin disinformation campaigns. It seems he also had powerful backers.
In his book The Assault on Intelligence, retired CIA chief Michael Hayden called Watts “the one man, who more than any other was trying to ring the alarm more than two years before the 2016 elections.”
Hayden credited Watts in his book with teaching him the power of social media: “Watts pointed out to me that Twitter makes falsehoods seem more believable through sheer repetition and volume. He labeled it a kind of ‘computational propaganda.’ Twitter in turn drives mainstream media.”
A false story algorithmically amplified by Twitter and disseminated by the media—it’s no coincidence that this perfectly describes the “bullshit” spread on Twitter about Russian influence operations: In 2017, it was Watts who came up with the idea for the Hamilton 68 dashboard and helped spearhead the initiative.
facebookII. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”
No one thought Trump was a normal politician. Being an ogre, Trump horrified millions of Americans who felt a personal betrayal in the possibility that he would occupy the same office held by George Washington and Abe Lincoln. Trump also threatened the business interests of the most powerful sectors of society. It was the latter offense, rather than his putative racism or flagrant un-presidentialness, that sent the ruling class into a state of apoplexy.
Given his focus in office on lowering the corporate tax rate, it’s easy to forget that Republican officials and the party’s donor class saw Trump as a dangerous radical who threatened their business ties with China, their access to cheap imported labor, and the lucrative business of constant war. But, indeed, that is how they saw him, as reflected in the unprecedented response to Trump’s candidacy recorded by The Wall Street Journal in September 2016: “No chief executive at the nation’s 100 largest companies had donated to Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through August, a sharp reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies supported GOP nominee Mitt Romney.”
The phenomenon was not unique to Trump. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist candidate in 2016, was also seen as a dangerous threat by the ruling class. But whereas the Democrats successfully sabotaged Sanders, Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, which meant that he had to be dealt with by other means.
Two days after Trump took office, a smirking Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that it was “really dumb” of the new president to get on the bad side of the security agencies that were supposed to work for him: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.”
Trump had used sites like Twitter to bypass his party’s elites and connect directly with his supporters. Therefore, to cripple the new president and ensure that no one like him could ever come to power again, the intel agencies had to break the independence of the social media platforms. Conveniently, it was the same lesson that many intelligence and defense officials had drawn from the ISIS and Russian campaigns of 2014—namely, that social media was too powerful to be left outside of state control—only applied to domestic politics, which meant the agencies would now have help from politicians who stood to benefit from the effort.
Immediately after the election, Hillary Clinton started blaming Facebook for her loss. Until this point, Facebook and Twitter had tried to remain above the political fray, fearful of jeopardizing potential profits by alienating either party. But now a profound change occurred, as the operation behind the Clinton campaign reoriented itself not simply to reform the social media platforms, but to conquer them. The lesson they took from Trump’s victory was that Facebook and Twitter—more than Michigan and Florida—were the critical battlegrounds where political contests were won or lost. “Many of us are beginning to talk about what a big problem this is,” Clinton’s chief digital strategist Teddy Goff told Politico the week after the election, referring to Facebook’s alleged role in boosting Russian disinformation that helped Trump. “Both from the campaign and from the administration, and just sort of broader Obama orbit…this is one of the things we would like to take on post-election,” Goff said.
The press repeated that message so often that it gave the political strategy the appearance of objective validity:
“Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook”; New York Magazine, Nov. 9, 2016.
“Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence”; The New York Times, Nov. 12, 2016.
“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”; The Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2016.
“Disinformation, Not Fake News, Got Trump Elected, and It Is Not Stopping”; The Intercept, Dec. 6, 2016.
And on it went in countless articles that dominated the news cycle for the next two years.
At first, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the charge that fake news posted on his platform had influenced the outcome of the election as “pretty crazy.” But Zuckerberg faced an intense pressure campaign in which every sector of the American ruling class, including his own employees, blamed him for putting a Putin agent in the White House, effectively accusing him of high treason. The final straw came a few weeks after the election when Obama himself “publicly denounced the spread of fake news on Facebook.” Two days later, Zuckerberg folded: “Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments.”
The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification—just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War—to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the backend of the internet’s biggest platforms.
Though there was never a public order given, the U.S. government began enforcing martial law online.
Adam Maida
dataIII. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?
The American doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare famously calls for “winning hearts and minds.” The idea is that victory against insurgent groups depends on gaining the support of the local population, which cannot be accomplished by brute force alone. In places like Vietnam and Iraq, support was secured through a combination of nation-building and appealing to locals by providing them with goods they were presumed to value: money and jobs, for instance, or stability.
Because cultural values vary and what is prized by an Afghan villager may appear worthless to a Swedish accountant, successful counterinsurgents must learn what makes the native population tick. To win over a mind, first you have to get inside it to understand its wants and fears. When that fails, there is another approach in the modern military arsenal to take its place: counterterrorism. Where counterinsurgency tries to win local support, counterterrorism tries to hunt down and kill designated enemies.
Despite the apparent tension in their contrasting approaches, the two strategies have often been used in tandem. Both rely on extensive surveillance networks to gather intelligence on their targets, whether that is figuring out where to dig wells or locating terrorists in order to kill them. But the counterinsurgent in particular imagines that if he can learn enough about a population, it will be possible to reengineer its society. Obtaining answers is just a matter of using the right resources: a combination of surveillance tools and social scientific methods, the joint output of which feeds into all-powerful centralized databases that are believed to contain the totality of the war.
I have observed, reflecting on my experiences as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, how, “data analytics tools at the fingertips of anyone with access to an operations center or situation room seemed to promise the imminent convergence of map and territory,” but ended up becoming a trap as “U.S. forces could measure thousands of different things that we couldn’t understand.” We tried to cover for that deficit by acquiring even more data. If only we could gather enough information and harmonize it with the correct algorithms, we believed, the database would divine the future.
Not only is that framework foundational in modern American counterinsurgency doctrine, but also it was part of the original impetus for building the internet. The Pentagon built the proto-internet known as ARPANET in 1969 because it needed a decentralized communications infrastructure that could survive nuclear war—but that was not the only goal. The internet, writes Yasha Levine in his history of the subject, Surveillance Valley, was also “an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.”
In the days of the internet “freedom agenda,” the popular mythology of Silicon Valley depicted it as a laboratory of freaks, self-starters, free thinkers, and libertarian tinkerers who just wanted to make cool things without the government slowing them down. The alternative history, outlined in Levine’s book, highlights that the internet “always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war.” There is truth in both versions, but after 2001 the distinction disappeared.
As Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, at the start of the war on terror “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism.”
In Afghanistan, the military had to employ costly drones and “Human Terrain Teams” staffed with adventurous academics to survey the local population and extract their relevant sociological data. But with Americans spending hours a day voluntarily feeding their every thought directly into data monopolies connected to the defense sector, it must have seemed trivially easy for anyone with control of the databases to manipulate the sentiments of the population at home.
More than a decade ago, the Pentagon began funding the development of a host of tools for detecting and countering terrorist messaging on social media. Some were part of a broader “memetic warfare” initiative inside the military that included proposals to weaponize memes to “defeat an enemy ideology and win over the masses of undecided noncombatants.” But most of the programs, launched in response to the rise of ISIS and the jihadist group’s adept use of social media, focused on scaling up automated means of detecting and censoring terrorist messaging online. Those efforts culminated in January 2016 with the State Department’s announcement that it would be opening the aforementioned Global Engagement Center, headed by Michael Lumpkin. Just a few months later, President Obama put the GEC in charge of the new war against disinformation. On the same day that the GEC was announced, Obama and “various high-ranking members of the national security establishment met with representatives from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other Internet powerhouses to discuss how the United States can fight ISIS messaging via social media.”
In the wake of the populist upheavals of 2016, leading figures in America’s ruling party seized upon the feedback loop of surveillance and control refined through the war on terror as a method for maintaining power inside the United States. Weapons created to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda were turned against Americans who entertained incorrect thoughts about the president or vaccine boosters or gender pronouns or the war in Ukraine.
Former State Department official Mike Benz, who now runs an organization called the Foundation for Freedom Online that bills itself as a digital free-speech watchdog, describes how a company called Graphika, which is “essentially a U.S. Department of Defense-funded censorship consortium” that was created to fight terrorists, was repurposed to censor political speech in America. The company, “initially funded to help do social media counterinsurgency work effectively in conflict zones for the U.S. military,” was then “redeployed domestically both on Covid censorship and political censorship,” Benz told an interviewer. “Graphika was deployed to monitor social media discourse about Covid and Covid origins, Covid conspiracies, or Covid sorts of issues.”
The fight against ISIS morphed into the fight against Trump and “Russian collusion,” which morphed into the fight against disinformation. But those were just branding changes; the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged. The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society.
For the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of dealing with the natives.
internetIV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon
Once upon a time, the internet was going to save the world. The first dot-com boom in the 1990s popularized the idea of the internet as a technology for maximizing human potential and spreading democracy. The Clinton administration’s 1997 “A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” put forth the vision: “The Internet is a medium that has tremendous potential for promoting individual freedom and individual empowerment” and “[t]herefore, where possible, the individual should be left in control of the way in which he or she uses this medium.” The smart people in the West mocked the naive efforts in other parts of the world to control the flow of information. In 2000, President Clinton scoffed that China’s internet crackdown was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” The hype continued through the Bush administration, when internet companies were seen as crucial partners in the state’s mass surveillance program and its plan to bring democracy to the Middle East.
But the hype really went into overdrive when President Obama was elected through a “big data”-driven campaign that prioritized social media outreach. There appeared to be a genuine philosophical alignment between Obama’s political style as the “Hope” and ”Change” president whose guiding principle in foreign policy was “Don’t do dumb shit” and the internet search company whose original motto was “Do no evil.” There were also deep personal ties connecting the two powers, with 252 cases over the course of Obama’s presidency of people moving between jobs at the White House and Google. From 2009 to 2015, White House and Google employees were meeting, on average, more than once a week.
As Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton led the government’s “Internet freedom” agenda, which aimed to “promote online communications as a tool for opening up closed societies.” In a speech from 2010, Clinton issued a warning about the spread of digital censorship in authoritarian regimes: “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said. “And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.”
It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation.
Or perhaps irony is not the right word to capture the difference between the freedom-loving Clinton of a decade ago and the pro-censorship activist of today, but it gets at what appears to be the about-face done by a class of people who were public standard-bearers for radically different ideas barely 10 years earlier. These people—politicians, first and foremost—saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents. That’s how to bridge the gap between the Hillary Clinton of 2013 and the Clinton of 2023: Both see the internet as an immensely powerful tool for driving political processes and effecting regime change.
Which is why, in the Clinton and Obama worlds, the rise of Donald Trump looked like a profound betrayal—because, as they saw it, Silicon Valley could have stopped it but didn’t. As heads of the government’s internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable—not because they had allowed Russia to “hack the election,” which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.
In his book Who Owns the Future?, tech pioneer Jaron Lanier writes, “The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultra-secret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power.” Because digital economies produce ever-greater concentrations of data and power, the inevitable happened: The tech companies got too powerful.
What could the leaders of the ruling party do? They had two options. They could use the government’s regulatory power to counter-attack: Break up the data monopolies and restructure the social contract underwriting the internet so that individuals retained ownership of their data instead of having it ripped off every time they clicked into a public commons. Or, they could preserve the tech companies’ power while forcing them to drop the pretense of neutrality and instead line up behind the ruling party—a tempting prospect, given what they could do with all that power.
They chose option B.
Declaring the platforms guilty of electing Trump—a candidate every bit as loathsome to the highly educated elites in Silicon Valley as he was to the highly educated elites in New York and D.C.—provided the club that the media and the political class used to beat the tech companies into becoming more powerful and more obedient.
russiagateV. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!
If one imagines that the American ruling class faced a problem—Donald Trump appeared to threaten their institutional survival—then the Russia investigation didn’t just provide the means to unite the various branches of that class, in and out of government, against a common foe. It also gave them the ultimate form of leverage over the most powerful non-aligned sector of society: the tech industry. The coordination necessary to carry out the Russian collusion frame-up was the vehicle, fusing (1) the political goals of the Democratic Party, (2) the institutional agenda of the intelligence and security agencies, and (3) the narrative power and moral fervor of the media with (4) the tech companies’ surveillance architecture.
The secret FISA warrant that allowed U.S. security agencies to begin spying on the Trump campaign was based on the Steele dossier, a partisan hatchet job paid for by Hillary Clinton’s team that consisted of provably false reports alleging a working relationship between Donald Trump and the Russian government. While a powerful short-term weapon against Trump, the dossier was also obvious bullshit, which suggested it might eventually become a liability.
Disinformation solved that problem while placing a nuclear-grade weapon in the arsenal of the anti-Trump resistance. In the beginning, disinformation had been only one among a half-dozen talking points coming from the anti-Trump camp. It won out over the others because it was capable of explaining anything and everything yet simultaneously remained so ambiguous it could not be disproved. Defensively, it provided a means to attack and discredit anyone who questioned the dossier or the larger claim that Trump colluded with Russia.
All the old McCarthyite tricks were new again. The Washington Post aggressively trumpeted the claim that disinformation swung the 2016 election, a crusade that began within days of Trump’s victory, with the article “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” (The lead expert quoted in the article: Clint Watts.)
A steady flow of leaks from intelligence officials to national security reporters had already established the false narrative that there was credible evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. When Trump won in spite of those reports, the senior officials responsible for spreading them, most notably CIA chief John Brennan, doubled down on their claims. Two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration released a declassified version of an intelligence community assessment, known as an ICA, on “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections,” which asserted that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
The ICA was presented as the objective, nonpolitical consensus reached by multiple intelligence agencies. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Jeff Gerth writes that the assessment received “massive, and largely uncritical coverage” in the press. But, in fact, the ICA was just the opposite: a selectively curated political document that deliberately omitted contrary evidence to create the impression that the collusion narrative was not a widely disputed rumor, but an objective fact.
A classified report by the House Intelligence Committee on the creation of the ICA detailed just how unusual and nakedly political it was. “It wasn’t 17 agencies, and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” a senior intelligence official who read a draft version of the House report told the journalist Paul Sperry. “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan handpicked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.” An Obama appointee, Brennan had broken with precedent by weighing in on politics while serving as CIA director. That set the stage for his post-government career as an MSNBC analyst and “resistance” figure who made headlines by accusing Trump of treason.
Mike Pompeo, who succeeded Brennan at the CIA, said that as the agency’s director, he learned that “senior analysts who had been working on Russia for nearly their entire careers were made bystanders” when the ICA was being written. According to Sperry, Brennan “excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a ‘wild card.’” (Brennan was also the one who overrode the objections of other agencies to include the Steele dossier as part of the official assessment.)
Despite its irregularities, the ICA worked as intended: Trump began his presidency under a cloud of suspicion that he was never able to dispel. Just as Schumer promised, the intelligence officials wasted no time in taking their revenge.
And not only revenge, but also forward-planning action. The claim that Russia hacked the 2016 vote allowed federal agencies to implement the new public-private censorship machinery under the pretext of ensuring “election integrity.” People who expressed true and constitutionally protected opinions about the 2016 election (and later about issues like COVID-19 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) were labeled un-American, racists, conspiracists, and stooges of Vladimir Putin and systematically removed from the digital public square to prevent their ideas from spreading disinformation. By an extremely conservative estimate based on public reporting, there have been tens of millions of such cases of censorship since Trump’s election.
And here’s the climax of this particular entry: On Jan. 6, 2017—the same day that Brennan’s ICA report lent institutional backing to the false claim that Putin helped Trump—Jeh Johnson, the outgoing Obama-appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that, in response to Russian electoral interference, he had designated U.S. election systems as “critical national infrastructure.” The move placed the property of 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the DHS. It was a coup that Johnson had been attempting to pull off since the summer of 2016, but that, as he explained in a later speech, was blocked by local stakeholders who told him “that running elections in this country was the sovereign and exclusive responsibility of the states, and they did not want federal intrusion, a federal takeover, or federal regulation of that process.” So Johnson found a work-around by unilaterally rushing the measure through in his last days in office.
It’s clear now why Johnson was in such a rush: Within a few years, all of the claims used to justify the extraordinary federal seizure of the country’s electoral system would fall apart. In July 2019 the Mueller report concluded that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russian government—the same conclusion reached by the inspector general’s report into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, released later that year. Finally, on Jan. 9, 2023, The Washington Post quietly published an addendum in its cybersecurity newsletter about New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics study. Its conclusion: “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters.”
But by then it didn’t matter. In the final two weeks of the Obama administration, the new counter-disinformation apparatus scored one of its most significant victories: the power to directly oversee federal elections that would have profound consequences for the 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden.
wotVI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended
Clint Watts, who headed up the Hamilton 68 initiative, and Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general, CIA chief, and NSA director who championed Watts, are both veterans of the U.S. counterterrorism establishment. Hayden ranks among the most senior intelligence officers the United States has ever produced and was a principal architect of the post-9/11 mass surveillance system. Indeed, an astounding percentage of the key figures in the counter-disinformation complex cut their teeth in the worlds of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare.
Michael Lumpkin, who headed the GEC, the State Department agency that served as the first command center in the war against disinformation, is a former Navy SEAL with a counterterrorism background. The GEC itself grew out of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications before being repurposed to fight disinformation.
Twitter had the chance to stop the Hamilton 68 hoax before it got out of hand, yet chose not to. Why? The answer can be seen in the emails sent by a Twitter executive named Emily Horne, who advised against calling out the scam. Twitter had a smoking gun showing that the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the neoliberal think tank behind the Hamilton 68 initiative, was guilty of exactly the charge it made against others: peddling disinformation that inflamed domestic political divisions and undermined the legitimacy of democratic institutions. But that had to be weighed against other factors, Horne suggested, such as the need to stay on the good side of a powerful organization. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote in February 2018.
The ASD was lucky to have someone like Horne on the inside of Twitter. Then again, maybe it wasn’t luck. Horne had previously worked at the State Department, handling the “digital media and think tank outreach” portfolio. According to her LinkedIn, she “worked closely with foreign policy reporters covering [ISIS] … and executed communications plans relating to Counter-[ISIS] Coalition activities.” Put another way, she had a background in counterterrorism operations similar to Watts’ but with more of an emphasis on spinning the press and civil society groups. From there she became the director for strategic communications for Obama’s National Security Council, only leaving to join Twitter in June 2017. Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.
It is no coincidence that the war against disinformation began at the very moment the Global War on Terror (GWOT) finally appeared to be coming to an end. Over two decades, the GWOT fulfilled President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence.” It evolved into a self-interested, self-justifying industry that employed thousands of people in and out of government who operated without clear oversight or strategic utility. It might have been possible for the U.S. security establishment to declare victory and move from a permanent war footing to a peacetime posture, but as one former White House national security official explained to me, that was unlikely. “If you work in counterterrorism,” the former official said, “there’s no incentive to ever say that you’re winning, kicking their ass, and they’re a bunch of losers. It’s all about hyping a threat.” He described “huge incentives to inflate the threat” that have been internalized in the culture of the U.S. defense establishment and are “of a nature that they don’t require one to be particularly craven or intellectually dishonest.”
“This huge machinery was built around the war on terror,” the official said. “A massive infrastructure that includes the intelligence world, all the elements of DoD, including the combatant commands, CIA and FBI and all the other agencies. And then there are all the private contractors and the demand in think tanks. I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars at stake.”
The seamless transition from the war on terror to the war on disinformation was thus, in large measure, simply a matter of professional self-preservation. But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level.
In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush promised to drain the swamps of radicalism in the Middle East. Only by making the region safe for democracy, Bush said, could he ensure that it would stop producing violent jihadists like Osama bin Laden.
Today, to keep America safe, it is no longer enough to invade the Middle East and bring its people democracy. According to the Biden White House and the army of disinformation experts, the threat is now coming from within. A network of right-wing domestic extremists, QAnon fanatics, and white nationalists is supported by a far larger population of some 70 million Trump voters whose political sympathies amount to a fifth column within the United States. But how did these people get radicalized into accepting the bitter and destructive white jihad of Trumpist ideology? Through the internet, of course, where the tech companies, by refusing to “do more” to combat the scourge of hate speech and fake news, allowed toxic disinformation to poison users’ minds.
After 9/11, the threat of terrorism was used to justify measures like the Patriot Act that suspended constitutional rights and placed millions of Americans under a shadow of mass surveillance. Those policies were once controversial but have come to be accepted as the natural prerogatives of state power. As journalist Glenn Greenwald observed, George W. Bush’s “‘with-us-or-with-the-terrorists’ directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party.”
The war on terror was a dismal failure that ended with the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan. It also became deeply unpopular with the public. Why, then, would Americans choose to empower the leaders and sages of that war to be the stewards of an even more expansive war against disinformation? It is possible to venture a guess: Americans did not choose them. Americans are no longer presumed to have the right to choose their own leaders or to question decisions made in the name of national security. Anyone who says otherwise can be labeled a domestic extremist.
domestic_extremistsVII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”
A few weeks after Trump supporters rioted in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier wrote an article for The New York Times advocating for the United States to wage a “comprehensive counterinsurgency program” against its own citizens.
Counterinsurgency, as Grenier would know, is not a limited, surgical operation but a broad effort conducted across an entire society that inevitably involves collateral destruction. Targeting only the most violent extremists who attacked law enforcement officers at the Capitol would not be enough to defeat the insurgency. Victory would require winning the hearts and minds of the natives—in this case, the Christian dead-enders and rural populists radicalized by their grievances into embracing the Bin Laden-like cult of MAGA. Lucky for the government, there is a cadre of experts who are available to deal with this difficult problem: people like Grenier, who now works as a consultant in the private-sector counterterrorism industry, where he has been employed since leaving the CIA.
Of course there are violent extremists in America, as there have always been. However, if anything, the problem is less severe now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when political violence was more common. Exaggerated claims about a new breed of domestic extremism so dangerous it cannot be handled through existing laws, including domestic terrorism statutes, is itself a product of the U.S.-led information war, which has effaced the difference between speech and action.
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots. They start with words,” Clint Watts proclaimed in 2017 when he testified before Congress. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations.” Watts is a career veteran of military and government service who seems to share the belief, common among his colleagues, that once the internet entered its populist stage and threatened entrenched hierarchies, it became a grave danger to civilization. But this was a fearful response, informed by beliefs widely, and no doubt sincerely, shared in the Beltway that mistook an equally sincere populist backlash termed “the revolt of the public” by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri for an act of war. The standard Watts and others introduced, which quickly became the elite consensus, treats tweets and memes—the primary weapons of disinformation—as acts of war.
Using the hazy category of disinformation allowed security experts to conflate racist memes with mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo and with violent protests like the one that took place at the Capitol. It was a rubric for catastrophizing speech and maintaining a permanent state of fear and emergency. And it received the full backing of the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and President Biden, all of whom, notes Glenn Greenwald, have declared that “the gravest menace to American national security” is not Russia, ISIS, China, Iran, or North Korea, but “‘domestic extremists’ in general—and far-right white supremacist groups in particular.”
The Biden administration has steadily expanded domestic terrorism and counter-extremism programs. In February 2021, DHS officials announced that they had received additional funding to boost department-wide efforts at “preventing domestic terrorism,” including an initiative to counter the spread of disinformation online, which uses an approach seemingly borrowed from the Soviet handbook, called “attitudinal inoculation.”
Adam Maida
ngoVIII. The NGO Borg
In November 2018, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy published a study titled “The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis.” The scope of the paper is comprehensive, but its authors are especially focused on the centrality of philanthropically funded nonprofit organizations and their relationship to the media. The Shorenstein Center is a key node in the complex the paper describes, giving the authors’ observations an insider’s perspective.
“In this landscape analysis, it became apparent that a number of key advocates swooping in to save journalism are not corporations or platforms or the U.S. government, but rather foundations and philanthropists who fear the loss of a free press and the underpinning of a healthy society. ... With none of the authoritative players—the government and platforms who push the content—stepping up to solve the problem quickly enough, the onus has fallen on a collective effort by newsrooms, universities, and foundations to flag what is authentic and what is not.”
To save journalism, to save democracy itself, Americans should count on the foundations and philanthropists—people like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Open Society Foundations’ George Soros, and internet entrepreneur and Democratic Party fundraiser Reid Hoffman. In other words, Americans were being asked to rely on private billionaires who were pumping billions of dollars into civic organizations—through which they would influence the American political process.
There is no reason to question the motivations of the staffers at these NGOs, most of whom were no doubt perfectly sincere in the conviction that their work was restoring the “underpinning of a healthy society.” But certain observations can be made about the nature of that work. First, it placed them in a position below the billionaire philanthropists but above hundreds of millions of Americans whom they would guide and instruct as a new information clerisy by separating truth from falsehood, as wheat from chaff. Second, this mandate, and the enormous funding behind it, opened up thousands of new jobs for information regulators at a moment when traditional journalism was collapsing. Third, the first two points placed the immediate self-interest of the NGO staffers perfectly in line with the imperatives of the American ruling party and security state. In effect, a concept taken from the worlds of espionage and warfare—disinformation—was seeded into academic and nonprofit spaces, where it ballooned into a pseudoscience that was used as an instrument of partisan warfare.
Virtually overnight, the “whole of society” national mobilization to defeat disinformation that Obama initiated led to the creation and credentialing of a whole new class of experts and regulators.
The modern “fact-checking” industry, for instance, which impersonates a well-established scientific field, is in reality a nakedly partisan cadre of compliance officers for the Democratic Party. Its leading organization, the International Fact-Checking Network, was established in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a central hub in the counter-disinformation complex.
Everywhere one looks now, there is a disinformation expert. They are found at every major media publication, in every branch of government, and in academic departments, crowding each other out on cable news programs, and of course staffing the NGOs. There is enough money coming from the counter-disinformation mobilization to both fund new organizations and convince established ones like the Anti-Defamation League to parrot the new slogans and get in on the action.
How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field—“disinformation”—that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge. For proof, look no further than the arc traced by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who pivoted from being failed podcast hosts to joining the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Such initiatives flourished in the years after Trump and Brexit.
But it went beyond celebrities. According to former State Department official Mike Benz, “To create a ‘whole of society’ consensus on the censorship of political opinions online that were ‘casting doubt’ ahead of the 2020 election, DHS organized ‘disinformation’ conferences to bring together tech companies, civil society groups, and news media to all build consensus—with DHS prodding (which is meaningful: many partners receive government funds through grants or contracts, or fear government regulatory or retaliatory threats)—on expanding social media censorship policies.”
A DHS memo, first made public by journalist Lee Fang, describes a DHS official’s comment “during an internal strategy discussion, that the agency should use third-party nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
It is not unusual that a government agency would want to work with private corporations and civil society groups, but in this case the result was to break the independence of organizations that should have been critically investigating the government’s efforts. The institutions that claim to act as watchdogs on government power rented themselves out as vehicles for manufacturing consensus.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the fields that have been most aggressive in cheerleading the war against disinformation and calling for greater censorship—counterterrorism, journalism, epidemiology—share a public record of spectacular failure in recent years. The new information regulators failed to win over vaccine skeptics, convince MAGA diehards that the 2020 election was legitimate, or prevent the public from inquiring into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they tried desperately to do.
But they succeeded in galvanizing a wildly lucrative whole-of-society effort, providing thousands of new careers and a renewed mandate of heaven to the institutionalists who saw populism as the end of civilization.
covidIX. COVID-19
By 2020, the counter-disinformation machine had grown into one of the most powerful forces in American society. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dumped jet fuel into its engine. In addition to fighting foreign threats and deterring domestic extremists, censoring “deadly disinformation” became an urgent need. To take just one example, Google’s censorship, which applied to its subsidiary sites like YouTube, called for “removing information that is problematic” and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”—a category that at different points in the constantly evolving narrative would have included wearing masks, implementing travel bans, saying that the virus is highly contagious, and suggesting it might have come from a laboratory.
President Biden publicly accused social media companies of “killing people” by not censoring enough vaccine disinformation. Using its new powers and direct channels inside the tech companies, the White House began sending lists of people it wanted banned, such as journalist Alex Berenson. Berenson was kicked off Twitter after tweeting that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement. The health authorities at the time were either misinformed or lying about the vaccines’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus. In fact, despite claims from the health authorities and political officials, the people in charge of the vaccine knew this all along. In the record of a meeting in December 2020, Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated, “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.”
Dystopian in principle, the response to the pandemic was also totalitarian in practice. In the United States, the DHS produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge US government narratives on Covid-19.”
“Due to both the pandemic and the disinformation about the election, there are increasing numbers of what extremism experts call ‘vulnerable individuals’ who could be radicalized,” warned Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Reduction, on the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riots.
Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum and capo di tutti capi of the global expert class, saw the pandemic as an opportunity to implement a “Great Reset” that could advance the cause of planetary information control: “The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise.”
exceptionX. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule
The laptops are real. The FBI has known this since 2019, when it first took possession of them. When the New York Post attempted to report on them, dozens of the most senior national security officials in the United States lied to the public, claiming the laptops were likely part of a Russian “disinformation” plot. Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operating as fully integrated branches of the state security infrastructure, carried out the government’s censorship orders based on that lie. The press swallowed the lie and cheered on the censorship.
The story of the laptops has been framed as many things, but the most fundamental truth about it is that it was the successful culmination of the yearslong effort to create a shadow regulatory bureaucracy built specifically to prevent a repeat of Trump’s 2016 victory.
It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press. The damage to the country’s underlying social fabric, in which paranoia and conspiracy have been normalized, is incalculable. As recently as February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the scandal as the “half-fake laptop story” and as “an embarrassment,” months after even the Bidens had been forced to acknowledge that the story is authentic.
While the laptop is the best-known case of the ruling party’s intervention in the Trump-Biden race, its brazenness was an exception. The vast majority of the interference in the election was invisible to the public and took place through censorship mechanisms carried out under the auspices of “election integrity.” The legal framework for this had been put in place shortly after Trump took office, when the outgoing DHS chief Jeh Johnson passed an 11th-hour rule—over the vehement objections of local stakeholders—declaring election systems to be critical national infrastructure, thereby placing them under the supervision of the agency. Many observers had expected that the act would be repealed by Johnson’s successor, Trump-appointed John Kelly, but curiously it was left in place.
In 2018, Congress created a new agency inside of the DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that was tasked with defending America’s infrastructure—now including its election systems—from foreign attacks. In 2019, the DHS added another agency, the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, which was focused on countering foreign disinformation. As if by design, the two roles merged. Russian hacking and other malign foreign-information attacks were said to threaten U.S. elections. But, of course, none of the officials in charge of these departments could say with certainty whether a particular claim was foreign disinformation, simply wrong, or merely inconvenient. Nina Jankowicz, the pick to lead the DHS’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, lamented the problem in her book How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict. “What makes this information war so difficult to win,” she wrote, “is not just the online tools that amplify and target its messages or the adversary that is sending them; it’s the fact that those messages are often unwittingly delivered not by trolls or bots, but by authentic local voices.”
The latitude inherent in the concept of disinformation enabled the claim that preventing electoral sabotage required censoring Americans’ political views, lest an idea be shared in public that was originally planted by foreign agents.
In January 2021, CISA “transitioned its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM [ed. note: an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation],” according to an August 2022 report from the DHS’s Office of Inspector General. After the pretense of fighting a foreign threat fell away, what was left was the core mission to enforce a narrative monopoly over truth.
The new domestic-focused task force was staffed by 15 employees dedicated to finding “all types of disinformation”—but specifically that which related to “elections and critical infrastructure”—and being “responsive to current events,” a euphemism for promoting the official line of divisive issues, as was the case with the “COVID-19 Disinformation Toolkit” released to “raise awareness related to the pandemic.”
Kept a secret from the public, the switch was “plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents,” according to Mike Benz. “DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.”
Just like that, without any public announcements or black helicopters flying in formation to herald the change, America had its own ministry of truth.
Together they operated an industrial-scale censorship machine in which the government and NGOs sent tickets to the tech companies that flagged objectionable content they wanted scrubbed. That structure allowed the DHS to outsource its work to the Election Integrity Project (EIP), a consortium of four groups: the Stanford Internet Observatory; private anti-disinformation company Graphika (which had formerly been employed by the Defense Department against groups like ISIS in the war on terror); Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public; and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Founded in 2020 in partnership with the DHS, the EIP served as the government’s “deputized domestic disinformation flagger,” according to congressional testimony from journalist Michael Shellenberger, who notes that the EIP claims it classified more than 20 million unique “misinformation incidents” between Aug. 15 and Dec. 12, 2020. As EIP head Alex Stamos explained, this was a work-around for the problem that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.”
Looking at the censorship figures that the DHS’s own partners reported for the 2020 election cycle in their internal audits, the Foundation for Freedom Online summarized the scope of the censorship campaign in seven bullet points:
- 22 million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
- 859 million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
- 120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
- 15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation,” often in real-time;
- <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
- Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
- Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes, an effort DHS partners openly plotted and bragged that tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.
onepartyXI. The New One-Party State
In February 2021, a long article in Time magazine by journalist Molly Ball celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Biden’s victory, wrote Ball, was the result of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” that drew together “a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election” in an “extraordinary shadow effort.” Among the many accomplishments of the heroic conspirators, Ball notes, they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” It is an incredible article, like an entry from the crime blotter that somehow got slipped into the society pages, a paean to the saviors of democracy that describes in detail how they dismembered it.
Not so long ago, talk of a “deep state” was enough to mark a person as a dangerous conspiracy theorist to be summarily flagged for monitoring and censorship. But language and attitudes evolve, and today the term has been cheekily reappropriated by supporters of the deep state. For instance, a new book, American Resistance, by neoliberal national security analyst David Rothkopf, is subtitled The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation.
The deep state refers to the power wielded by unelected government functionaries and their paragovernmental adjuncts who have administrative power to override the official, legal procedures of a government. But a ruling class describes a social group whose members are bound together by something deeper than institutional position: their shared values and instincts. While the term is often used loosely and sometimes as a pejorative rather than a descriptive label, in fact the American ruling class can be simply and straightforwardly defined.
Two criteria define membership in the ruling class. First, as Michael Lind has written, it is made up of people who belong to a “homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta.” America has always had regional elites; what is unique about the present is the consolidation of a single, national ruling class.
Second, to be a member of the ruling class is to believe that only other members of your class can be allowed to lead the country. That is to say, members of the ruling class refuse to submit to the authority of anyone outside the group, whom they disqualify from eligibility by casting them as in some way illegitimate.
Faced with an external threat in the form of Trumpism, the natural cohesion and self-organizing dynamics of the social class were fortified by new top-down structures of coordination that were the goal and the result of Obama’s national mobilization. In the run-up to the 2020 election, according to reporting by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein for The Intercept, “tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives … to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.”
Historian Angelo Codevilla, who popularized the concept of an American “ruling class” in a 2010 essay and then became its primary chronicler, saw the new, national aristocracy as an outgrowth of the opaque power acquired by the U.S. security agencies. “The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated,” he wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations.
What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue, “in informational and management solutions to existential problems” and in their “own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures.” As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth. While technically an opposition party is still permitted to exist in the United States, the last time it attempted to govern nationally, it was subjected to a yearslong coup. In effect, any challenge to the authority of the ruling party, which represents the interests of the ruling class, is depicted as an existential threat to civilization.
An admirably direct articulation of this outlook was provided recently by famous atheist Sam Harris. Throughout the 2010s, Harris’ higher-level rationalism made him a star on YouTube, where thousands of videos showcased him “owning” and “pwning” religious opponents in debates. Then Trump arrived. Harris, like so many others who saw in the former president a threat to all that was good in the world, abandoned his principled commitment to the truth and became a defender of propaganda.
In a podcast appearance last year, Harris acknowledged the politically motivated censorship of reporting related to Hunter Biden’s laptops and admitted “a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.” But, echoing Ball, he declared this a good thing.
“I don’t care what’s in the Hunter Biden laptop. … Hunter Biden could have had corpses of children in his basement, and I would not have cared,” Harris told his interviewers. He could overlook the murdered children because an even greater danger lurked in the possibility of Trump’s reelection, which Harris compared to “an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.”
With an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, even the most principled rationalists might end up asking for safety over truth. But an asteroid has been falling toward Earth every week for years now. The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.
censorshipXII. The End of Censorship
The public’s glimpses into the early stages of the transformation of America from democracy to digital leviathan are the result of lawsuits and FOIAs—information that had to be pried from the security state—and one lucky fluke. If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter, many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.
But the system reflected in those disclosures may well be on its way out. It is already possible to see how the kind of mass censorship practiced by the EIP, which requires considerable human labor and leaves behind plenty of evidence, could be replaced by artificial intelligence programs that use the information about targets accumulated in behavioral surveillance dossiers to manage their perceptions. The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people’s experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.
In fact, that sounds rather similar to what Google is already doing in Germany, where the company recently unveiled a new campaign to expand its “prebunking” initiative “that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation,” according to the Associated Press. The announcement closely followed Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ appearance on a German podcast, during which he called for using artificial intelligence to combat “conspiracy theories” and “political polarization.” Meta has its own prebunking program. In a statement to the website Just The News, Mike Benz called prebunking “a form of narrative censorship integrated into social media algorithms to stop citizens from forming specific social and political belief systems” and compared it to the “pre-crime” featured in dystopian science-fiction movie Minority Report.
Meanwhile, the military is developing weaponized AI technology to dominate the information space. According to USASpending.gov, an official government website, the two largest contracts related to disinformation came from the Department of Defense to fund technologies for automatically detecting and defending against large-scale disinformation attacks. The first, for $11.9 million, was awarded in June 2020 to PAR Government Systems Corporation, a defense contractor in upstate New York. The second, issued in July 2020 for $10.9 million, went to a company called SRI International.
SRI International was originally connected to Stanford University before splitting off in the 1970s, a relevant detail considering that the Stanford Internet Observatory, an institution still directly connected to the school, led 2020’s EIP, which might well have been the largest mass censorship event in world history—a capstone of sorts to the record of pre-AI censorship.
Then there is the work going on at the National Science Foundation, a government agency that funds research in universities and private institutions. The NSF has its own program called the Convergence Accelerator Track F, which is helping to incubate a dozen automated disinformation-detection technologies explicitly designed to monitor issues like “vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism.”
“One of the most disturbing aspects” of the program, according to Benz, “is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad.”
In March, the NSF’s chief information officer, Dorothy Aronson, announced that the agency was “building a set of use cases” to explore how it could employ ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of a reasonable simulation of human speech, to further automate the production and dissemination of state propaganda.
The first great battles of the information war are over. They were waged by a class of journalists, retired generals, spies, Democratic Party bosses, party apparatchiks, and counterterrorism experts against the remnant of the American people who refused to submit to their authority.
Future battles fought through AI technologies will be harder to see.
democracyXIII. After Democracy
Less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times published an important article titled “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.” The essay’s author, Times staff writer and Yale Law School graduate Emily Bazelon, argued that the United States was “in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation” that she compares to the “catastrophic” health effects of the novel coronavirus. She quotes from a book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley and linguist David Beaver: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.”
So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country’s ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia.
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”
To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists—a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.
A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.
If you work in the “disinformation” or “misinformation” fields for the government or in the private sector, and are interested in discussing your experiences, you can contact me securely at [email protected] or on Twitter @jacob__siegel. Source confidentiality is guaranteed.
Jacob Siegel is a Tablet contributing editor. He is writing a book for Henry Holt about the rise of the Information State that will be published in 2025. He co-hosts the Manifesto! podcast with the novelist Phil Klay.
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.
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.
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What to ask your climate scientist friend about the water cycle and global temperature
In a recent post, “Why It Is Important to Read Scientific Papers Beyond Their Abstracts“, I noted that as the human brain has a limited information processing speed, if most of the incoming information is about carbon dioxide, other important problems of the human predicament, water in particular, will remain dangerously understudied. In my post today, I will add specificity to that statement.
I will discuss two peer-reviewed studies published in the same mainstream journal (Journal of Climate of the American Meteorological Society, AMS) in 2010 and 2021. Both studies use global climate models to address one and the same problem. While they come to opposite conclusions, the later study does not look into the discrepancy with the earlier one. Furthermore, the results of the earlier study, without discussing its discrepancy with the later one, are then used in a 2023 report by the World Resources Institute that aims at a broad audience, including policymakers. None of the studies attempt to approach the problem from first principles, but confine themselves to discussing the outputs of numerical models, for which, therefore, there are no independent constraints.
But first, what’s the problem?
Let us take a look at how we’ve recently changed the face of the Earth.
This graph describes the replacement of primary ecosystems by anthropogenically modified systems (data from Hurtt et al. 2011). Since 1800, the area occupied by primary ecosystems has halved. They no longer dominate over land.
Where natural forests have been replaced by agricultural fields, it looks like this:
One can notice that, deprived of vegetation, the Earth’s surface becomes brighter. Solar energy no longer cascades via complicated biochemical channels to energize the biotic maintenance of environmental homeostasis. Instead, unclaimed by life, it is reflected back into space. Yes, other things being equal, this cools the planet. But what are those other things, and are they equal?
During photosynthesis, green leaves release a lot of water vapor. When a leaf opens to catch a CO2 molecule, water vapor flows out from the leaf’s humid interior into the atmosphere. This process is called transpiration. When forests are replaced by bare fields, transpiration is greatly reduced.
Since our atmosphere can only hold a limited amount of water vapor (which condenses back to liquid when its concentration goes over the limit), precipitation and total evaporation (which includes transpiration) are closely matched on the timescale of a few days. When transpiration is reduced, precipitation is reduced as well.
Our question is as follows. What will happen to the Earth’s mean global surface temperature if we diminish the intensity of the global water cycle by disturbing primary vegetation and reducing transpiration over land? As I discussed in the opening post on this blog, “Global cooling from plant transpiration” (see also the corresponding peer-reviewed study), there is plausible evidence that the effect can be significant. Indeed, given that global evaporation corresponds to a global mean energy flux of 80 W/m2, by decreasing evaporation by 20% over half of the land, we could perturb this flux by about 3%, or by 2.4 W/m2, which is comparable to the current radiative forcing from CO2. In my view, this question is so fundamental to understanding our climate system that one would expect it to be in textbooks. That is not the case.
Let us look at what the scientific literature has to say and how it approaches this question. The study of Davin and Noblet-Ducoudré (2010) uses a state-of-the-art global climate model (the one used in IPCC scenarios) to compare two hypothetical states of the Earth. In one simulation (FOREST) all land except modern deserts is covered with forests. In another simulation (EVA) all land has the same albedo and roughness as in FOREST, but has a much lower transpiration efficiency corresponding to a grassland.
This suppression of transpiration results in widespread warming on land, see the left panel (EVA-FOREST). Besides, it produces a global warming of 0.24 K.
Importantly, there is not practically any change of the outgoing long-wave radiation between the two states. This means that this global warming from suppressed transpiration cannot be attributed to changes in albedo (e.g., due to changing cloud cover).
The authors attribute this global warming to an "internal redistribution of energy in the climate system". Its nature is not specified — like for example we know that CO2 warms the Earth by trapping thermal radiation, but how does an internal redistribution of energy warm it? Nor any considerations are presented that could independently constrain the magnitude of the resulting warming and validate the model outcome.
Without a deeper understanding, even among the scientists themselves, of what the underlying mechanisms could be, messages based solely on numerical model outputs are circulated and communicated to the public and decision makers. One of the key figures in the 2023 report of the World Resources Institute “Not just carbon” ,
Fig. 2.5 “Modeled CO2, Biophysical, and Net Impacts by Latitude of Global Forest Loss”, is based on the results of Davin and Noblet-Ducoudré (2010). The yellow “ET” bars in the left panel represent the latitude-dependent warming due to reduced evaporation and transpiration as found in their model.
The second study, of Laguë et al. (2021), uses a simpler global climate model where one can freely configure the shape of the continents. Fully suppressing evaporation on a hypothetical land that covers 1/4 of the planetary surface, they also obtain warming on land but a global cooling of -0.4 K. Warming over land is more than compensated by cooling over the ocean.
The authors attribute this global cooling to there being less water vapor in the atmosphere, and hence a lower greenhouse effect, when evaporation is suppressed. While they mention the 2010 study in a row of studies addressing similar problems, they do not discuss the discrepancy between their own study and the earlier one. In the 2010 study, evaporation was also suppressed, but apparently this did not produce a lower greenhouse effect, since the planet warmed as a whole.
Imagine for a moment that one study in an AMS journal reported warming from increased CO2, and another reported cooling from increased CO2 without discussing the results of the former. Yes, it is unthinkable. The second study would not make it to publication in the first place. This is (partly) because, as far as CO2 is concerned, besides numerical models there have always been theoretical considerations based on well established physical principles that allow an independent check on model outputs. With respect to the impact of vegetation on the Earth’s global surface temperature such independent theoretical considerations do not exist nor are there any large-scale efforts to develop them.
This situation is unsatisfactory. If an "internal redistribution of energy in the climate system" can warm our planet, we absolutely need to know whether we understand its nature and get it quantitatively right.
I am positive. At a certain moment people will massively get tired of just trying to decipher the meaning of another simulation produced by an ever more sophisticated climate model and will again champion thinking. Another positive factor could be that, as the models become more and more sophisticated and computationally consuming, fewer and fewer researchers will be able to actually oversee and use them, let alone modify according to their research needs. For the remaining community, a re-prioritization of other research methods, including theory development, will become more attractive. As a recent Perspective puts it,
“State-of-the-art models, observational systems and machine learning are transforming our ability to simulate, monitor and emulate many aspects of land climate. Our scientific understanding, however, has not kept pace, and we now lack robust theories to comprehend the rich complexity being revealed by these advanced tools. Now is the time to change course and underpin models, observations and machine-learning techniques with new theories so that we maintain and advance the deep, mechanistic understanding of land climate needed to meet the challenges of an uncertain future.” (Byrne et al. 2024)
Cited references
Byrne, M.P., Hegerl, G.C., Scheff, J. et al. Theory and the future of land-climate science. Nat. Geosci. 17, 1079–1086 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01553-8
Davin, E. L., & de Noblet-Ducoudré, N. (2010). Climatic impact of global-scale deforestation: Radiative versus nonradiative processes. Journal of Climate, 23(1), 97-112. https://doi.org/10.1175/2009JCLI3102.1
Hurtt, G. C., Chini, L. P., Frolking, S., Betts, R. A., Feddema, J., Fischer, G., ... & Wang, Y. P. (2011). Harmonization of land-use scenarios for the period 1500–2100: 600 years of global gridded annual land-use transitions, wood harvest, and resulting secondary lands. Climatic change, 109, 117-161. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0153-2
Laguë, M. M., Pietschnig, M., Ragen, S., Smith, T. A., & Battisti, D. S. (2021). Terrestrial evaporation and global climate: Lessons from Northland, a planet with a hemispheric continent. Journal of Climate, 34(6), 2253-2276. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-20-0452.1
Makarieva, A. M., Nefiodov, A. V., Rammig, A., & Nobre, A. D. (2023). Re-appraisal of the global climatic role of natural forests for improved climate projections and policies. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 6, 1150191. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1150191
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*Warning: this post contains disturbing, violent, videos: the violence & terrorism of US/Turkish/Israeli-backed terrorists against Syrian civilians.
The following is on the hell of the "new Syria" ruled by al-Qaeda/ISIS terrorist Joolani, where his co-terrorist thugs run around hunting down minorities, torturing & killing them.
There are countless such videos, and worse, being shared on Telegram & social media, from Syrians who film these terrorists' attacking civilians (because media in Syria is now under control of HTS/al-Qaeda, you won't see reports there...nor from the influencers chirping about how great & free Syria is now, and hey, _ISIS are very helpful_ people...)
Following are just some examples of the lawlessness and pure terrorism that has been unleashed on Syria, on Syrian civilians. This is what the idiots who cheered the toppling of the former Syrian government have endorsed.
Alawites in Syria are facing genocide at the hands of jihadists targeting their sect. The lie about holding so-called war criminals accountable is clear to anyone who understands Arabic and isn’t a jihadist—videos speak for themselves. In this video, they openly say, "You are Alawite," as they torture their victims. The sole reason for this brutality is their faith. Do not stay silent. There is a sectarian massacre happening in Syria! [source]
January 4, 2025, 6:00 PM
Location: Western Talkalakh countryside, Kherbet Al-Ashari Incident: At 6:00 PM today, unarmed Alawites were brutally attacked, beaten, insulted, and cursed by HTS , with the participation of some local residents affiliated with them." [source]
“In the Homs countryside, young Alawites are being arrested and murdered without any valid reason.” [source]
“Al-Tall - Damascus Countryside
The Commission’s members continue their crimes. Yesterday, an operation took place to liquidate Samer Daas and another person on charges of belonging to the former regime. They were shot in the car and their bodies were burned near one of the ovens, without being subjected to the judiciary or the courts.
In the second video, the car is documented after it was burned and the bodies were removed from it.” [source]
**By the way notice (in 2nd video) the White Helmets cleaning up after terrorist murder a civilian, just like they did throughout their existence, hand in hand with the terrorists.
“HTS accounts shared videos of civilians being tortured in Homs countryside, accusing them of collaborating with the former regime or being Alawite or Christian, framing it as “revenge.”” [source]
“Horrific Crime in Latakia: HTS killed a man and dragged him publicly, with the crowd cheering. This brutal act highlights the absence of justice and accountability in Syria.” [source]
"The blessings of revolution and freedom in Syria..." [source]
“Homs - Dallal Nashiwati St., Wadi al-Dahab, January 2, 2025
Hundreds of unarmed civilians were beaten, humiliated, arrested, and tortured by HTS due to sectarian motives. Their fate remains unknown." [source]
“Jubb al-Jarrah, Homs: Mass arrest of Alawite villagers by what appears to be HTS terrorists.” [source]
[source]
“New Syria. Arrest on identity! You are Sunni?! Are you Alawite or Shiite?!
Execution! This is what the internationally wanted Al-Julani gangs do.” [source]
*Btw, @ 0:49, one man replies he is from Harem, the terrorist curses him and says everyone from Harem are pigs! He curses another man from Harem and repeats his cursing against people from Harem.
In Syria, in 2014, I met a man from Harem, right near the Turkish border, who spoke of (in 2013) being kidnapped by terrorists for 3 months and 5 days…and of them kidnapping others, murdering them, and sending their decapitated heads back to the families.
“They had tanks and guns, like an army, just like an army. They killed around 110 people, and kidnapped around 250… children, civilians, soldiers. Until now, we don’t know what’s happened to them.”
This list is not complete, sadly, it is a glimpse into what hell Syrians are enduring now, to the criminal silence of global media.
For continued updates, please follow Syr Doc on their Telegram
Meanwhile, in the ancient town of Maaloula, the only town in Syria where inhabitants still speak the ancient Christian language of Aramaic, has been under siege for two weeks, reducing its population from 1,000 to just 200. [source]
Maaloula was occupied by terrorists from September 2013 to May 2014. I visited exactly two months after it was liberated by Hezbollah, the Syrian army, local defenders and allies. The destruction the West’s terrorists meted out was horrific, devastating.
See one of my prior posts for my writings on Maaloula, based on my 2014 and 2016 visits there. There are many photos and testimonies to highlight the destruction and terrorism of this cherished historic town.
In 2018, I went back there during the Festival of the Cross, during which time I attended a moving mass and saw the enthusiastic celebrations afterwards.
From my overview of this:
I asked Abdo Haddad to summarize the importance of the Festival of the Cross. He said (video):
“Tonight we are celebrating the finding of the cross that happened 1700 years ago. This celebration is represented by putting fire on top of the mountains, from Jerusalem to Constantinople, to tell the people in Constantinople that the cross was found.
Maaloula is the only place in the world that is still celebrating this custom.
The only time that this custom stopped is when the so-called rebels and other “revolution” people in Syria invaded Maaloula, and instead of putting fire on top of the mountain, they put our houses on fire. But since we are sons and daughters of life, we kept on celebrating it since Maaloula was liberated by the Syrian army in 2014.
So we celebrate life now, and we celebrate the cross.
We were born here 3,000 years ago and we’ll keep existing until the end of time.”
At the time, I mistakenly thought the worst was behind the town and that their history would be preserved. Now, I fear for the worst.
Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (photo from 2018).
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have officially begun negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Whatever the territorial solutions, they will not resolve the entire dispute. It will probably persist beyond peace.
Three problems overlap:
1) NATO’s expansion to the East and the Brzeziński Doctrine
When the East Germans themselves tore down the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989), the West, taken by surprise, negotiated the end of the two Germanys. Throughout 1990 the question arose whether German reunification would mean that East Germany, by joining West Germany, would enter NATO or not.
When the Atlantic Alliance Treaty was signed in 1949, it did not protect certain territories of certain signatories. For example, the French territories in the Pacific (Réunion, Mayotte, Wallis and Futuna, Polynesia and New Caledonia) were not covered. It would therefore have been possible that, in a unified Germany, NATO would not have been allowed to deploy in East Germany.
This issue is very important for the Central and Eastern European states that were attacked by Germany during the Second World War. In the eyes of their populations, seeing sophisticated weapons being installed on their borders was worrying. Even more so for Russia, whose immense borders (6,600 kilometres) are indefensible.
At the Malta Summit (2-3 December 1989) between the US and Russian Presidents, George Bush (the father) and Mikhail Gorbachev, the US argued that it had not intervened to bring down the Berlin Wall and that it had no intention of intervening against the USSR at that time [1].
West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stated that "the changes in Eastern Europe and the process of German unification must not lead to an ’attack on Soviet security interests’". Consequently, NATO should rule out an ’expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. a rapprochement with the Soviet borders’"
The three occupying powers of Germany, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, therefore made repeated commitments not to expand NATO towards the East. The Moscow Treaty (12 September 1990) assumed that a reunified Germany would not claim territory from Poland (Oder-Neisse line), and that no NATO bases would be present in East Germany [2].
At a joint press conference in 1995 at the White House, President Boris Yeltsin described the meeting they had just had as "disastrous", provoking laughter from President Bill Clinton. It is indeed better to laugh than to cry.
However, the Russians were informed that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was touring the capitals to prepare the NATO membership of former Warsaw Pact states. President Boris Yeltsin therefore harangued his counterpart, Bill Clinton, at the Budapest summit (5 December 1994) of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He declared: "Our attitude towards NATO’s enlargement plans, and in particular the possibility of infrastructure progress to the East, remains and will remain invariably negative. Arguments such as: enlargement is not directed against any state and is a step towards the creation of a unified Europe, do not stand up to criticism. This is a decision whose consequences will determine the European configuration for years to come. It may lead to a slide towards the deterioration of trust between Russia and the Western countries. […] NATO was created at the time of the Cold War. Today, not without difficulty, it is seeking its place in the new Europe. It is important that this approach does not create two zones of demarcation, but on the contrary, that it consolidates European unity. This objective, for us, is contradictory to NATO’s expansion plans. Why sow the seeds of distrust? After all, we are no longer enemies; we are all partners now. The year 1995 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Half a century later, we are increasingly aware of the true significance of the Great Victory and the need for historic reconciliation in Europe. There must no longer be adversaries, winners and losers. For the first time in its history, our continent has a real chance of finding unity. To miss it is to forget the lessons of the past and to call into question the future itself. Bill Clinton replied: "NATO will not automatically exclude any nation from membership. […] At the same time, no external country will be allowed to veto expansion.” [3].
At this summit, three memoranda were signed, including one with independent Ukraine. In exchange for its denuclearization, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States committed to refraining from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.
However, during the Yugoslav wars, Germany intervened, as a member of NATO. It trained Kosovar fighters on the basis of the Incirlik Alliance (Türkiye), then deployed its men there.
However, at the NATO summit in Madrid (8 and 9 July 1997), the heads of state and government of the Alliance announced that they were preparing for the accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In addition, they are also considering that of Slovenia and Romania.
Aware that it cannot prevent sovereign states from entering into alliances, but worried about the consequences for its own security of what is being prepared, Russia intervened in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at the Istanbul summit (18 and 19 November 1999). It had a declaration adopted establishing the principle of free membership of any sovereign state in the alliance of its choice and that of not taking measures for its security to the detriment of that of its neighbours.
However, in 2014, the United States organised a colour revolution in Ukraine, overthrowing the democratically elected president (who wanted to keep his country halfway between the United States and Russia) and installing a neo-Nazi regime that was publicly aggressive against Russia.
In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO. In 2009, it was Albania and Croatia. In 2017, Montenegro. In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, Finland, and in 2024, Sweden. All promises have been broken.
To understand how we got to this point, we also need to know what the United States was thinking.
In 1997, former security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzeziński, published The Grand Chessboard. In it, he discusses “geopolitics” in the original sense, that is, not the influence of geographical data on international politics, but a plan for world domination.
According to him, the United States can remain the world’s leading power by allying itself with the Europeans and isolating Russia. Now retired, this democrat offers the Straussians a strategy to keep Russia in check, without however proving them right. Indeed, he supports cooperation with the European Union, while the Straussians wish on the contrary to slow its development (Wolfowitz doctrine). In any case, Brzeziński would become an advisor to President Barack Obama.
Monument in Lviv to the glory of the criminal against Humanity Stepan Bandera
2) Nazification of Ukraine
At the beginning of the special operation of the Russian army in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin declared that his first goal was to denazify the country. The West then pretended to ignore the problem. They accused Russia of exaggerating some marginal facts although they had been observed on a large scale for a decade.
This is because the two rival US geopoliticians, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzeziński, had formed an alliance with the “integral nationalists” (i.e. with the disciples of the philosopher Dmytro Dontsov and the militia leader Stepan Bandera) [4], at a conference organized by the latter in Washington in 2000. It was on this alliance that the Department of Defense had bet, in 2001, when it outsourced its research into biological warfare to Ukraine, under the authority of Antony Fauci, then Health Advisor to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It was also on this alliance that the State Department had bet, in 2014, with the Euromaidan color revolution.
The two Ukrainian Jewish presidents, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky, allowed memorials to be built throughout their country paying tribute to Nazi collaborators, particularly in Galicia. They allowed Dmytro Dontsov’s ideology to become the historical reference. For example, today, the Ukrainian population attributes the great famine of 1932-1933, which caused between 2.5 and 5 million deaths, to an imaginary desire of Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians; a founding myth that does not stand up to historical analysis [5], in fact, this famine affected many other regions of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it is on the basis of this lie that Kyiv managed to make its population believe that the Russian army wanted to invade Ukraine. Today, several dozen countries, including France [6] and Germany [7], have adopted, by overwhelming majorities, laws or resolutions to validate this propaganda.
Nazification is more complex than we think: with NATO’s involvement in this proxy war, the Centuria Order, that is to say the secret society of Ukrainian integral nationalists, has penetrated the Alliance forces. In France, it is already present in the Gendarmerie (which, by the way, has never made public its report on the Boutcha massacre).
The contemporary West wrongly perceives the Nazis as criminals who primarily massacred Jews. This is absolutely false. Their main enemies were the Slavs. During the Second World War, the Nazis murdered many people, first by shooting and then, from 1942, in camps. The Slavic civilian victims of Nazi racial ideology were more numerous than the Jewish victims (about 6 million if we add the people killed by shooting and those killed in the camps). Moreover, since some victims were both Slavic and Jewish, they are included in both assessments. After the massacres of 1940 and 1941, approximately 18 million people from all backgrounds were interned in concentration camps, of whom 11 million in total were murdered (1,100,000 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp alone) [8]..
The Soviet Union, which was torn apart during the Bolshevik revolution, did not reunite until 1941 when Joseph Stalin formed an alliance with the Orthodox Church and put an end to the massacres and political internments (the "gulags") to fight against the Nazi invasion. The victory against racial ideology founded today’s Russia. The Russian people see themselves as the slayers of racism.
3) Russia’s rejection from Europe
The third bone of contention between the West and Russia arose not before, but during the Ukrainian war. The West adopted various measures against what symbolized Russia. Of course, unilateral coercive measures (abusively called “sanctions”) were taken at the government level, but discriminatory measures were also taken at the citizen level. Many restaurants were banned for Russians in the United States or Russian shows were canceled in Europe.
Symbolically, we accepted the idea that Russia is not European, but Asian (which it also partially is). We rethought the Cold War dichotomy, opposing the free world (capitalist and believer) to the totalitarian specter (socialist and atheist), into an opposition between Western values (individualist) and those of Asia (communitarian).
Behind this shift, racial ideologies are resurfacing. I noted three years ago that the New York Times’ 1619 Project and President Joe Biden’s woke rhetoric were in reality, perhaps unwittingly, a reverse reformulation of racism [9]. I note that today President Donald Trump shares the same analysis as me and has systematically revoked all of his predecessor’s woke innovations. But the damage is done: last month, Westerners reacted to the appearance of the Chinese DeepSeek by denying that Asians could have invented, and not copied, such software. Some government agencies have even banned it from their employees in what is nothing other than a denunciation of the “yellow peril.”
Should Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the author of "War and Peace", be censored as Ukraine does, where his books are burned because he was Russian?
4) Conclusion
Current negotiations focus on what is directly palpable by public opinion: borders. However, the most important thing is elsewhere. To live together, we need not to threaten the security of others and to recognize them as our equals. This is much more difficult and does not only involve our governments.
From a Russian point of view, the intellectual origin of the three problems examined above lies in the Anglo-Saxon refusal of international law [10]. Indeed, during the Second World War, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed at the Atlantic Summit that after their common victory, they would impose their law on the rest of the world. It was only under pressure from the USSR and France that they accepted the UN statutes, but they continued to flout them, forcing Russia to boycott the organization when they refused the People’s Republic of China the right to sit on it. The glaring example of Western duplicity is given by the State of Israel, which tramples on a hundred resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and opinions of the International Court of Justice. This is why, on December 17, 2021, when the war in Ukraine was looming, Moscow proposed to Washington [11] to prevent it by signing a bilateral treaty providing guarantees for peace [12]. The idea of this text was, nothing more, nothing less, that the United States renounce the "rules-based world" and fall in line with international law. This right, imagined by the Russians and the French just before the First World War, consists solely of keeping one’s word in the eyes of public opinion.
The first weeks of the second Trump administration have been a wild ride. Like many, I’ve been blown away by the speed and scope of the blitzkrieg that Trump and his team have unleashed on the permanent managerial state in Washington. He has already fulfilled many of the priorities I outlined two months ago in “The Counter-Revolution Begins,” the most significant of which was to reject being conservative about institutions or the exercise of legitimate power. With its “you can just do things” energy, Trump 2.0 seems to be the first administration serious about delivering on democratic demands for real change in American governance since FDR.
In fact, the blows continue to fall so fast that it’s honestly hard to keep track of it all. I’ve therefore found it difficult to say anything about the specifics of what’s happening. To try to do so here would be to be overtaken by events almost immediately. But amid the furor kicked up by a dozen different world-shaking moves – from trying to annex Greenland, to the closing of borders and imposition of trade tariffs, to the dismantling of USAID – I think we can begin to glimpse a much bigger picture that is now coming into view.
There’s a 2018 quote by the late Henry Kissinger that’s circulated recently, in which he mused about whether “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” If that wasn’t true in 2018 it certainly is now. I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it, and that the full import and implications of this haven’t really struck us yet.
More specifically, I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century.
The Long Twentieth
The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century.” The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War. After the cataclysm, an interregnum that ended only with the conclusion of WWII, everything about how the people of Western civilization perceived and engaged with the world – politically, psychologically, artistically, spiritually – had changed.
R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century.” His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000. Our Long Twentieth Century had a late start, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its spirit has dominated our civilization’s whole understanding of how the world is and should be. It has set all of our society’s fears, values, and moral orthodoxies. And, through the globe-spanning power of the United States, it has shaped the political and cultural order of the rest of the world as well.
The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.
Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”
Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.
The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.
As Reno catalogues in detail, new approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character, vilify collective loyalties, cast doubt on hierarchies, break down all boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of all moral and relational duties. Aspiration to a vague universal humanitarianism soon became the only higher good that it was socially acceptable to aim for other than pure economic growth.
The anti-fascism of the twentieth century morphed into a great crusade – characterized, ironically, by a fiery zeal and fierce intolerance. By making “never again” its ultimate priority, the ideology of the open society put a summum malum (greatest evil) at its core rather than any summum bonum (highest good). The singular figure of Hitler didn’t just lurk in the back of the 20th century mind; he dominated its subconscious, becoming a sort of secular Satan, forever threatening to tempt mankind into new wickedness. This “second career of Adolf Hitler,” as Renaud Camus jokingly calls it, provided the parareligious raison d'etre for the open society consensus and the whole post-war liberal order: to prevent the resurrection of the undead Führer.
This doctrine of prevention grants enormous moral weight to ensuring that open society values triumph over those of the closed society in every circumstance. If it’s assumed that the only options are “the open society or Auschwitz” then maintaining zero tolerance for the perceived values of the closed society is functionally a moral commandment. To stand in the way of any possible aspect of societal opening and individual liberation – from secularization, to the sexual revolution and LGBTQ rights, to the free movement of migrants – was to do Hitler’s work and risk facilitating fascism’s return (no matter how far removed the subject concerned from actual fascism). It was established as the open society’s only inviolable rule that, as Reno puts it, it is “forbidden to forbid.” Thus a strict new cultural orthodoxy was consolidated, in which to utter any opinion contrary to the continuous project of further opening up societies became verboten as a moral evil. Complete inclusion required rigorous exclusion. We are familiar with this dogma today as political correctness.
The end of the Cold War then sent the open society consensus into overdrive. Far from moderating its zeal, the fall of Soviet communism (liberalism’s last real ideological competitor) seemed to validate the moral and practical superiority of the open society, and the post-Cold War establishment doubled down on the belief that the whole world could and should be rebuilt in its image, ushering in the end of history.
The crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom. This conviction was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which seemed to help demonstrate that the continued existence of closed-minded intolerance anywhere was a threat to tolerance everywhere. As one hawkish politician quoted in Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe put it not long afterwards, “We [now] live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but civility and human rights.”
If you’ve been wondering why USAID was spending $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces, $500,000 to “expand atheism” in Nepal, or $7.9 million to catechize Sri Lankan journalists in avoiding “binary-gendered language,” this is why. It’s the same reason the U.S. government was pouring millions into funding “charities” dedicated to breaking U.S. immigration law and facilitating open borders migration: they believed they were fighting the good fight against the closed society in order to stop zombie Hitler (while skimming a whole lot of cash on the side for their good deeds). It’s also why, for decades, anyone who’s objected has been automatically tarred as a literal fascist.
Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance. There was a very direct and deliberate connection. As Carl Schmitt noted early in the twentieth century, an “elemental impulse” of liberalism is “neutralization” and “depoliticization” of the political – that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking “politics” to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-war project’s structural aims. Just as Schmitt had predicted, the goal became to achieve perpetual peace through an “age of technicity,” in which politics would be reduced to the safer, more predictable movements of a machine through the empowerment of supposedly-neutral mechanisms like bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, and expert technocratic commissions.
Actual public contention over genuinely political questions, especially by the dangerously fascism-prone democratic masses, was in contrast now judged to be too dangerous to permit. The post-war establishment of the open society dreamed instead of achieving governance via scientific management, of transforming the political sphere into “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of this machine could then be limited to a cadre of carefully selected and educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s phrasing.
Thus the great expansion of our modern managerial regimes, including the American “deep state” that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are now trying to dismantle. Characterized by vast permanent administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, such regimes are run by an oligarchic elite class of technocrats schooled in social engineering, dissimulation, false compassion, the manipulation of allegedly-neutral processes, and a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance. The obsessive management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship also became an especially key priority in such regimes, with the objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes (to defend “democracy” against the masses) and to generally suppress serious public discussion of contentious yet fundamental political issues (such as mass migration policies) in an effort to prevent civil strife.
Nor was this managerial impulse toward depoliticization limited to the national level. The creation of a “rules-based liberal international order” – in which all political contention would be managed by quasi-imperial supranational structures (such as the UN and EU) and war between states would become a relic of the barbaric past – was the pinnacle of post-war Western ambitions. Backed by the military power of the United States and its allies, this new international order would show zero tolerance for unauthorized conflict, depoliticizing the world and allowing open societies to flourish in peace.
The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.
That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.
Restoration of the Gods
Mary Harrington recently observed that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally “exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be “understood archetypally as [their] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such.” This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, “as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own.” Thus now “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.”
Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.
But, as reality began to intrude over the past two decades, the share of people still convinced by the hazy promises of the open society steadily diminished. A reaction began to brew, especially among those most divorced from and harmed by its aging obsessions: the young and the working class. The “populism” that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting, and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.
Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth. And that in turn requires a rejection of the pathological “tyranny of guilt” (as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner once dubbed it) that has gripped the Western mind since 1945. As the power of endless hysterical accusations of “fascism” has gradually faded, we have – for better and worse – begun to witness the end of the Age of Hitler.
Energetic national populism is, then, a rejection of all the core obsessions and demands of the twentieth century and the open society consensus that so dominated it. The passionless reign of weakness, tolerance, and drab universalist utilitarianism being held up as moral and political ideals seems to be ending. And that means the gerontocracy of the Long Twentieth Century is finally dying off too. This is what Trump, in all his brashness, represents: the strong gods have escaped from exile and returned to America, dragging the twenty-first century along behind them.
Dawn of a New Century
Trump himself is a man of action, not rumination (let alone self-recrimination), and he clearly possesses a high tolerance for risk. He is instinctual, not actuarial. He is relational, not rationalistic, valuing loyalty and possessing a prickly sense of honor. He utters common truths with no regard for whether this offends the sensibilities of others, and has little patience for endless “dialogue” or established procedures. And, an unabashed nationalist, he doesn’t hesitate to wield strength on behalf of American interests, or to put those interests ahead of others’ around the world. He is, in other words, neither cause nor mere symptom of populist upheaval but in a real sense an embodiment of the whole rebellious new world spirit that’s now overturning the old order.
Trump’s policies so far in his second term also reflect this new zeitgeist. His blitzkrieg of executive action has struck directly at the three pillars of the Long Twentieth Century: closing the nation’s borders and purging the state of the latest ideological evolution of open society orthodoxy (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) while inspiring the broader culture to do the same; moving to dismantle the managerial state, including by affirming the elected Executive’s direct, personal control over the sheltered proceduralist (i.e. democratically uncontrollable and unaccountable) bureaucracy; and transforming U.S. foreign policy by rejecting liberal proceduralism in the international sphere as well, putting national interests ahead of the interests of the “international order” and declining to automatically play the role of global rule-enforcer.
The very boldness of this action reflects more than just partisan political gamesmanship – in itself it represents the stasis of the old paradigm being upended; now “you can just do things” again. This mindset hasn’t been seen in America since FDR and his revolutionary government remade the country and established the modern managerial state; no one has dared to so much as jostle the machine he created since the end of WWII. Now Trump has.
Abroad and in Washington, this brash attitude has caused much consternation and confusion (“Why is Trump threatening to invade Mexico, bully Canada, and annex Greenland from a NATO ally? Wasn’t he supposed to be an isolationist?”) But the principle behind all Trump’s behavior here actually appears to be quite straightforward: he is willing to use American might however may benefit the nation, rather than caring very much about protecting the status quo liberal international order for its own sake or adhering to polite fictions like international law. Turns out “you can just do things” on the world stage too. Diplomacy and alliances are logically seen as of value only insofar as they benefit America. This is indeed what “America First” always meant. In this way the Trump Doctrine is simply a rejection of the neurotic, confrontation-avoidant post-war consensus in favor of the restoration of standard muscular, Western Hemisphere-focused, pre-twentieth century American foreign policy, in the style of a president Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, or Teddy Roosevelt.
New Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even explicitly described the idealism of the global U.S.-enforced liberal international order as an “anomaly,” noting that it “was a product of the end of the Cold War” and that “eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.” This revitalization of the spirit of national sovereignty and international competition seems to already be spreading and inspiring a turn back towards stronger gods around the world. As Hungary’s conservative-nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently put it to a gathering of European populists, “Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks. An era has ended. Today, everyone sees that we are the future.”
So while at a surface level the vibe of the Trump revolution might be mistaken as merely marking a return to circa-1990s libertarianism, with its individual freedom and “greed is good” free-market mindset, he represents a far more significant shift than that: back – or rather forward – more than a century. The globalist neoliberalism, interventionist one-world internationalism, and naive social progressivism of the 90s open society is dead and gone. Despite his political alliance with the Right-Wing Progressives of Silicon Valley, Trump’s new world is in a real sense distinctly post-liberal.
Reactionary Remnants
It is little wonder then why Trump so horrifies the aging aristocracy of the Long Twentieth Century: they fear above all the return of the strong gods, which their whole project of moral and political world-building was conducted to preclude.
Note, for example, the appearance of increasingly panicked admonitions (in between or in haphazard fusion with accusations of fascism) about the imminent danger of “Christian Nationalism.” This is a term that welds together two strong gods – nationalism and religion – and so is a particularly triggering phantom. This is also why a certain type of limp conservative (known most politely online as the “cuckservative”) displays particular hysteria about Trump and populism. This type really is a conservative, in the sense that his priority in life is to prevent change to the status quo, decrying any decisive action, including any legitimate exercise of democratic power, that risks disrupting the open society consensus. Although he may mouth selective disagreement with progressive “excesses” that also risk undermining that consensus, at his core such a man is foremost a servant of the weak gods of managerial timidity.
For eight decades now the old elite, left- and right- wings alike, has been unified by their shared prioritization of the open society and its values. Although it may have surprised some Americans to see previously right-coded figures like Dick Cheney side with the political left in the last election, it should not have. Cheney was a radical proponent of the open society consensus – just in the form of neoconservatism, the American church militant of imposing the gospel of openness around the world at the point of the sword. In this he was never that different from dedicated leftists like George Soros, who founded an activist institution named quite explicitly after his objective (the Open Society Foundation) and used its vast network of influence to subvert and deconstruct conservative cultures around the globe, including in the United States.
That both men would do this as powerful scions of the same Western establishment is not contradictory but completely logical, given that what united that establishment was the open society consensus. Even the most radical “counter-cultural” rebels of the 1960s were really no such thing, given that their goals were identical to those of the post-war establishment: to progressively advance the opening up of society. They disagreed only on the pace of change, and the establishment soon accommodated their zeal and brought them into the fold.
Trump and populist-nationalist movements are the first real break from this consensus since its conception. They herald the arrival of a very different world.
A New World Opens
Despite its obsession with “openness,” the world of the post-war open society has in truth always been, in its own way, a strictly enclosed and deeply stifling place. It is a world in which human nature, indeed our very humanity, is viewed with great suspicion, as something dangerous to be surveilled, suppressed, and contained – or, even better, remolded into a reliable cog to fit safely into a predictable, riskless machine. Its dream of a world of perfect freedom, equality, rationalism, and passivity has always been one “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe,” as Ernst Jünger once put it.
From the very beginning of the Long Twentieth Century, some clear-eyed liberal thinkers, such as Leo Strauss, could foresee that attempting to entirely ignore the realities and banish the values of the “closed society” in pursuit of “a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled” was always liable to end only in rebellion, bloodshed, and self-destruction. Open society liberalism’s dogmatic pursuit of negation would, Strauss warned, undermine the very virtues – like loyalty, duty, courage, and love of one’s own – that all societies rely on to survive and sustain themselves. As Matthew Rose astutely observes, Strauss understood that the strong gods of the closed society “are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded.” And, that a “society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them.”
Such warnings were ignored, however. The traumas of the twentieth century made ideas like nationalism, or even any clear distinction between “us” and “them,” into taboos that were impossible to discuss seriously. That finding the proper balance between “closed’ and “open” values is necessary to maintain a healthy society was a fact carefully ignored for decades.
Now the strong gods are nonetheless being haphazardly called back into the world as the vitalistic neo-romanticism of our revolutionary moment of reformation tears down the decaying walls and guard towers of the open society. Their return brings real risks, or course – although the return of risk is kind of the point. The thing about strong gods is that they’re strong, meaning they can be fearsome and dangerous; which is precisely why they also have the strength to protect and defend. It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.
But we no longer have much of a choice in the matter; the strong gods’ restoration has become inevitable, one way or another. We’re living in a whole new century now. The Long Twentieth Century has run its course, the world it bequeathed to us in the West having proved a wholly unsustainable mix of atomization, listlessness, self-abnegation, and petty impersonal tyranny. Our societies will either accept the offer of revitalization or fade out of existence, to be replaced by other stronger, more grounded and cohesive cultures.
As Reno rightly concludes in Return of the Strong Gods, “Our time – this century – begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home.” God willing, we can all find that home again as we enter the twenty-first century.
I have referenced Arnold Toynbee, an encyclopedic historian a few times in interviews, most recently in this discussion with James Delingpole.
There is a misunderstanding, usually divided along political party lines, about the United States and other nominally sovereign independent countries of the world. Typically the “leftists” call them “democracies”, while the conservatives in the US counter this with “we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy”. Other groups decry the corporate form of the US government. I think trying to pinpoint the ill invariably misses the point, as any state will undergo all of these forms before a given civilization ends.
According to Toynbee, a “universal state” is the last phase of a society before extinction. This doesn’t mean people go extinct: they don’t disappear as a group, however they may be reduced in numbers. We are talking about the concept of a “state” in this case. As Toynbee describes, universal states typically last a century or two, and all eventually disappear, but all proclaim that they are eternal right up to the point of their demise. The chapters I am quoting from primarily deal with Rome as a universal state, but draw comparisons and reference from many others - Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, Japanese. Toynbee postulates that the imperial Rome (but not its earlier versions, i.e., royal, magisterial and republican) became the universal state for the disintegrating Hellenic (Greek) world. Reproduced below without commentary. I hope the quotes from ~2000 years ago ring a bell…
One World Government is a desperate last-ditch “Indian summer” attempt at staving off the collapse and disintegration of the existing world order. IMO, it has no chance of coming to fruition now.
Objectively, no universal state has ever been literally universal in the sense of having covered the entire surface of the globe; but in a significant subjective sense these states have indeed been universal, for they have looked and felt worldwide to the people living under their regime. The Romans and the Chinese […] thought of their respective empires as embracing all the peoples in the world that were of any account…
[…]
Universal states are, let us remind ourselves, essentially negative institutions. In the first place, they arise after, and not before the breakdown of civilizations to which they bring political unity. They are not summers but Indian summers, masking autumn and presaging winter. […] There is, however, an element of ambiguity in them, for, while universal states are thus symptoms of social disintegration, they are at the same time attempts to check this disintegration and defy it.
[Universal states invariably position themselves and are perceived by contemporaries as immortal and divine.]
[After it’s establishment after the battle of Actium in 31 BC], the secret of Roman imperial government was the principle of indirect rule. The Hellenic universal state was conceived of by its Roman founders as an association of self-governing city-states with a fringe of autonomous principalities in the regions where the Hellenic culture had not yet struck political root. The burden of administration - which even at the end of the Hellenic time of troubles, was still publicly regarded as an honorable and covetable load - was to be left resting on the shoulders of these responsible self-governing local authorities; the imperial government was to confine itself to the twofold task of keeping the local communities in harmony with one another and protecting them against attacks from the outer barbarians; and for these limited imperial activities, a slender military framework and a light political superstructure were all that was required. This fundamental policy was never deliberately revised; yet, if we look again at the Roman Empire as it emerged from a spell of two centuries of Roman Peace, we shall find that its administrative structure had in fact been transformed as a result of innovations that were reluctant and piecemeal, but were far-reaching in their cumulative effect because they were all in the same direction.
By end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-80), the last of the client principalities had been gleichgeschaltet [uniformized, often in a forced or totalitarian manner] with the provinces, and, more significant still, the provinces themselves had become organs of direct administration instead of remaining mere frameworks for local groups of self-administering city-states. […] in the course of … two centuries, however, the human resources for the conduct of local government gradually ran dry, and the central government, faced with this increasing dearth of the local administrative talent on which it had been accustomed to rely, found itself constrained not only to replace the client-princes with imperial governors but to put the administration of the city-states in the hands of ‘city-managers’ who were appointed by the imperial authorities instead of being elected (as the city-state magistrates were) by the local notables, and who were indirectly responsible to the Emperor himself. […] while the self-complacent local magistrates and town councilors of the once self-governing city-states have been degraded into becoming unwilling instruments of the central exchequer for extracting ruinously heavy taxes from the local notables…
[…]
Another cause of the persistence of the belief in the immortality of the universal states is the impressiveness of the institution itself, as distinct from the prestige of the successive rulers who are its living incarnation.
[…]
Appian of Alexandria (AD 90-160) [a Greek who became a Roman propagandist, wrote] in the preface to his Studies in Roman History,
“the [Roman] state has reached its highest point of organization and the public revenue its highest figure, while as long and stable peace has raised the whole world to a level of secure prosperity. A few more subject nations have been added by the emperors to those already under the Roman dominion, and others which have revolted have been reduced to obedience; but, since the Romans already posses the choicest portions of the land and water surface of the globe, they are wise enough to aim at retaining what they hold rather than extending their Empire to infinity over the poverty-stricken and unremunerative territories of uncivilized nations. I myself have seen representatives of such nations attending at Rome on diplomatic missions and offering to become her subjects, and the Emperor refusing to accept the allegiance of peoples who would be of no value to his government. There are other nations innumerable whose kings the Romans appoint themselves, since they feel no necessity to incorporate them in their Empire. There are also certain subject nations to whom they make grants from their treasury, because they are too proud to repudiate them in spite their being a financial burden. They have garrisoned the frontiers of their Empire with a ring of powerful armies, and keep guard over this vast extent of land and sea as easily as if it were a modest farm”.
In the view of Appian and Aelius Aristeides [AD 117-181], the Roman Empire was eternal:
“…just as the sum total of things is eternal, because there is no room, outside it, for its components to fly apart, and there are no extraneous bodies that can collide with it and disintegrate it with a mighty blow.”
In these lines of the Roman poet Lucretius [BC 90-50], his teacher Democritus’s [BC 460] argument looks as impregnable as the Roman limes [borders] itself:
“Nor is there any force that can modify the sum of things. There is no space outside into which any kind of matter can escape out of the totality. Nor is there any space outside from which some new force can arise, break in, transform the whole nature of things, and deflect its motions.”
A universal state has indeed as little to fear from outer barbarians as the Universe has from stray star cluster that are ex hypothesi non-existent; yet the argument is a fallacy nevertheless, for, as we have seen in an earlier context, ‘things rot through evils native to their selves’ [Menander, BC 342-292, fragment 540]. In physical Nature there are elements whose atoms disintegrate by spontaneous radioactivity without requiring any bombardment from extraneous particles; and in human social life, universal states ‘are betray’d by what is false within’ [George Meredith] into revealing, for those who have eyes to see through their specious appearance of impregnability, that, so far from being immortal, these are spontaneously fissile polities.
However long the life of a universal state maybe drawn out, it always proves to have been the last phase of a society before its extinction. Its goal is the achievement of immortality, but the attempt to secure immortality in this world is a vain effort, whether blind or deliberate, to thwart the economy of Nature.
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 1400 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. [For some notable entries try the tag Notable.
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!
“Poets are often held in high repute in Russia and often feared by government not because of the power of poetry to move and shape souls, but because, in Russia only great poets dare speak the truth.”
Eric Hoffer
I know that many musicians and other creative spirits feel as if they have little significance or impact in our society. The prevailing metrics of success—money, power, whatever—relegate their work to the fringes and sub-fringes.
As I’ve suggested elsewhere, they don’t even get the respect given, in an earlier era, to a counterculture.
In the past, you might not get rich as a member of the counterculture—but at least you had a voice that was heard by the mainstream, and occasionally received some tokens of appreciation. Mainstream elites were not so isolated and antagonistic as today, and felt they needed a reality check from outside—but not anymore.
Conformity is the safest path now. Sometimes it feels like the only path.
Why is this the case?
There are many reasons, but I would focus especially on the technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations.
Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram?
But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.
If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.
That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication.
Yes, there were situations far more dire than our own.
So let me share a story that gives me comfort. It’s almost a parable of the creative life and its hidden power. This particular tale testifies to my belief that artists of vision and courage can even rise above the most brutal dictator.
Alas, this victory of art over tyranny only happens over the long run. But it does happen.
And when it finally occurs, the turnaround takes place so dramatically and resoundingly that we need to reconsider our conventional definitions of power and influence.
I’m referring to the case of Anna Akhmatova.
15-year-old Anna Akhmatova in 1904
Akhmatova, was a promising poet in the days before the Soviet Revolution, but her physical presence was just as compelling as her writing. Modigliani made at least twenty paintings of Akhmatova, and she had an affair with the famous poet Osip Mandelstam. Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak proposed marriage to her on multiple occasions.
Even far away at Oxford, philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—whom I considered the most brilliant person in the entire University when I was a student there—allegedly pined away with romantic longings based on his brief encounter with Akhmatova 35 years before.
I don’t think it’s going too far to claim that she could have been a movie actress, given her beauty and allure.
Nathan Altman’s Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1915
But Akhmatova was crushed under Soviet rule.
Not only was her poetry sharply criticized and censored, but the secret police bugged her apartment, and kept her under surveillance.
She was silenced so completely, that many people simply assumed she was dead.
One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)
But the most painful loss was her son, Lev Gumliev. After the execution of his father, when their child was just nine, Lev got sent to a Soviet labor camps. When he was finally released from captivity, authorities insisted that he fight in the Red Army. Then he was sent off to the prison camps again in 1949.
Akhmatova was desperate to save the life of her son. But what can a poet—even a poet of genius—do in such situations?
“I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad,” she later recalled. She traveled to Kresty Prison every day to hold a futile vigil. She tried constantly to get some word about her son’s status.
Or give him a parcel. Or find someone to beg for his release.
But to no avail.
Here each day she waited with so many other women, often in bitter cold weather—bundled in heavy clothes in front of the closed gates. One day someone in the crowd recognized the poet, who had once been so esteemed and beautiful. She asked Akhmatova whether her poetic gifts were capable of describing this scene of tragedy.
What could be more futile than a poem in the face of Stalinist purges and executions? But Akhmatova told her inquirer: “I can.” And in that horrible and desolate place, “something like a smile” appeared on the other woman’s face.
Akhmatova began working on what would be her greatest work, the long poem called Requiem. But this was a dangerous endeavor.
Publishing a poem of this sort, even overseas, was out of the question. Just putting the words down on paper could lead to her execution—the secret police might search her apartment at any time.
So she burnt the pages she used for rough drafts. The polished version was retained in her memory.
For seventeen months I’ve called you
To come home, I’ve pleaded
—Oh my son, my terror!—groveled
At the hangman’s feet.
So much I can’t say who’s
Man, who’s beast any more, nor even
How long till execution.
(From the translation of Requiem by D.M. Thomas)
This is one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. But the lines that inspire me the most come on the final page, where Anna Akhmatova makes that extraordinary prediction of the destiny for her and this forbidden work.
And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me.
She is literally taunting Stalin and the Soviet secret police here, but with an authority of her own—one only the creative artist possesses. Yet, in some miracle, she triumphed over the dictatorship.
No, Akhmatova herself didn’t live long enough to see it happen. But she did survive Stalin, and her son was released from incarceration. He eventually witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Akhmatova got shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, and finally—the year before her death in 1966—was allowed to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. Her global renown as a voice of courage and integrity was so powerful that even the Soviet authorities were now afraid of the consequences of cracking down on her.
So they did nothing when Requiem was finally published in Germany in 1963. And the long poem even got issued in the USSR in 1987, at a time when the regime was now the pathetic vulnerable party.
But the most remarkable moment of vindication came when they erected a statue of Anna Akhmatova in her native land.
It happened on the 40th anniversary of her death in 2006. By then, even the name of the city had changed—it was no longer Leningrad, but St. Petersburg once more. And Akhmatova was now returning to the scene of her greatest suffering and tragedy, but in towering bronze form atop a granite pillar.
Anna Akhmatova, larger than life, stares down Kresty Prison
Meeting her poetic demands, they placed her statue facing Kresty Holding Prison, where she had once waited before the closed gates, day after day.
Her visage is strong and defiant, and the inscription reads:
That’s why I pray not for myself
But for all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.
This is more than the triumph of one woman.
Art is more powerful than pundits or politicians, or even the most brutal dictator. It survives the longest. It has an authority that comes from a higher source.
We do well to remember that—especially in times when the creative impulse seems so weak and ineffective.
That weakness is an illusion. Art triumphs in the end. The very hollowness of its opponents ensures that eventual victory. It’s really just a matter of time.
Seen here which is not a real "weblog", but takes you to the most recent content, not February 22 entry shown here.
February 22. Two similar quotes on metaphysics. From the novel Lanark by Alasdair Gray:
God, you see, is a word. It is the word for everything not speaking when someone says 'I think.' And by
Propper's Law of Inverse Exclusion (which enables a flea in a matchbox to declare itself jailor of the universe)
every single 'I think' has intimate knowledge of the surface of what it is not. But as every thinker reflects a
different surface of what he isn't, and as God is our word for the whole, it follows that all agreement about
God is based on misunderstanding.
And from Lore of Proserpine by Maurice Hewlett:
Who knows what his neighbor sees? Who knows what his dog? Every species of us walks secret from the
others; every species of us the centre of his universe, its staple of measure, and its final cause. And if at
times one is granted a peep into new heavens and a new earth, and can get no more, perhaps the best thing
we win from that is the conviction that we must doubt nothing and wonder at everything.
The latter is a strange 1913 book by a novelist who claimed to see fairies. It's a great companion to Dora Van Gelder's The Real World of Fairies, and I've just added it to my books page, along with Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, which I'm now reading for the third time
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
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.]