The movie involves the saga of Mitch (Gabe Jarret), a brilliant high school student whose Science Fair project has revised the theory of laser beam technology. He is personally recruited by Professor Hathaway (William Atherton), a famous physics professor who wants the kid to work in his personal laboratory. Once on campus, the kid meets the legendary Chris Knight (Val Kilmer), the most brilliant freshman in history who is now a junior whose mind is beginning to be cluttered by mischief. The two students room together, and there seems to be a third person in the room: a strange, wraith-like bearded figure who disappears into the clothes closet, and doesn’t seem to be there when the door is flung open.
The professor is running a scam. He has a Defense Department contract for a sophisticated laser device so accurate that it could incinerate a single man on Earth from a base in orbit. The professor is using his students as slave labor to do most of the work on the project, while ripping off the government grant to build himself a new house. The students, meanwhile, have no idea they’re working on a weapons system, and are more interested in using laser beams to lead everyone to a “Tanning Invitational” they’ve set up by turning a lecture hall into a swimming pool.
“Real Genius” allows every one of its characters the freedom to be complicated and quirky and individual. That’s especially true of Jordan (Michelle Meyrink), a hyperactive woman student who talks all the time and never sleeps and knits things without even thinking about it, and follows Mitch into the john because she’s so busy explaining something that she doesn’t even notice what he’s doing. I recognize students like this from my own undergraduate days. One of the most familiar types on campus (and one of the rarest in the movies) is the self-styled eccentric, who develops a complex of weird personality traits as a way of clearing space and defining himself.
“Real Genius” was directed by Martha Coolidge, who made “Valley Girl,” one of the best and most perceptive recent teenage movies. What I like best about her is that she gives her characters the freedom to be themselves. They don’t have to be John Belushi clones, or fraternity jocks, or dumb coeds. They can flourish in all of their infinite variety, as young people with a world of possibilities and a lot of strange, beautiful notions. “Real Genius” contains many pleasures, but one of the best is its conviction that the American campus contains life as we know it.
Film director Jonathan Gazer’s acceptance speech went viral. But Jewish community leaders know there will be no professional damage for misrepresenting his words
Film director Jonathan Glazer poked a hornet’s nest with his acceptance speech this week as he won an Oscar for The Zone of Interest, a film about the family of Auschwitz’s Nazi commandant who live peacefully inside a walled garden, cut off from the horrors just the other side.
Glazer says the film’s point is not simply to drive home a history lesson. It’s “not to say, ‘Look what they did then.’ Rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”
There could not be pithier summary of the difference between the universal moral impulse found in Jews like Glazer, and the particularist Zionist impulse found in the people who noisily claim to speak for the Jewish community – and are readily given a bullhorn to do so by western establishments.
The first group says, “Never again.” The second group cries, “Never again, unless it serves Israel’s interests.”
And given Israel’s decades-long craving to dispossess the Palestinians of their entire homeland, that second “Never again” is as good as worthless. Palestinians were always in danger of erasure – not just territorially, as happened in 1948 and 1967, but existentially, as is happening now – by a state misleadingly declaring itself to be Jewish.
Universal ethics sidelined
The assumption of many was that the West would never tolerate another genocide being conducted in its name.
How misplaced that certainty was. The West is arming and funding the genocide in Gaza, and providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Its commitment to helping Israel carry out mass slaughter is such that many western states have frozen their funding to the UN aid agency UNRWA, which is specifically charged with keeping Palestinians in Gaza fed and alive.
Observers underestimated how far things had shifted. Over many decades, a universal ethics that drew on the lessons of the Holocaust – and solidified into international law – was intentionally undermined, sidelined and replaced by a particularist Zionist “ethics”.
That readjustment happened with the active connivance of western powers, which had no interest in promoting the universal lessons of recent history. For their own self-interested reasons, they preferred the particularist agenda of Zionism. It sat easily with the West’s insistence that its privileges continue: the right to wage wars and steal the resources of others, the ability to trample on indigenous peoples, and the power to destroy the planet and other species.
Ideology for dark times
In fact, Zionism was never centrally about Israel. It is a much broader ideology, rooted in western tradition and tailor-made for the darker times we are entering, in which systems collapse – of economies, of climate stability, of authority – poses new challenges to western establishments.
Zionism started as a Christian doctrine centuries ago, and flourished in the Victorian era among British politicians. It views Jews chiefly as a vehicle to advance a brutal, end-of-times redemption in which they are to be the the main sacrificial victims.
Though less conspicuously today, Christian Zionism still shapes the climate in which today’s politicians operate – as the large number of “Friends of Israel” in both major parties attests. Christian Zionism is the self-professed view too of many tens of millions of rightwing evangelicals in the US and elsewhere.
Whether in its Christian or Jewish incarnations, Zionism was always a “might is right”, “law of the jungle” doctrine, drawing on Old Testament-style ideas of chosen-ness, divine purpose, and rationalisations for violence and savagery. It sits all too comfortably with the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza.
No disgrace or shame
Jewish leaders and influencers in the West who champion more, not less, genocide in Gaza face neither disgrace nor shame. They are not shunned for cheering policies that have entailed so far the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of at least 100,000 Palestinian children. Why? Because they are articulating an Israel-focused version of an ideology that fits neatly with the worldview of western establishments.
For this reason, Jewish influencers lost no time working to smear Glazer as a self-hating Jew by misrepresenting his speech – quite literally by editing out the parts that did not fit their particularist, anti-universal agenda.
Referencing the victims both of October 7 and of Israel’s attack on Gaza, Glazer told the Oscars audience: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
He was expressly opposing his Jewishness being weaponised in support of a genocide. He was standing apart from many Jewish community leaders and influencers who have weaponised their own Jewishness to justify violence against civilians. He was reminding us that the Holocaust’s lesson is that ideologies must never trump our humanity, must never be used to rationalise evil.
All of which poses a huge threat to those in the Jewish community who have, for years, been precisely weaponising their Jewishness for political ends – in the service of Israel and its decades-old project to remove the Palestinian people from their historic homeland.
The real moral rot
In a moment of pure projection, for example, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, dubbed by media outlets as “the most famous rabbi in America“, castigated Glazer for supposedly “exploiting the Holocaust” and for trivializing “the memory of the 6 million victims through whom he found Hollywood glory”.
Boteach apparently cannot understand that it is he, not Glazer, who has been exploiting the Holocaust – in his case, for decades in the service of protecting Israel from any criticism, even now as it commits a genocide.
Meanwhile, Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor at Newsweek, broke with all journalistic norms to completely misrepresent Glazer’s speech, accusing him of “moral rot” for supposedly disavowing his Jewishness. Rather, as he made all too clear, he was rejecting how his Jewishness and the Holocaust were being hijacked by genocide apologists such as Ungar-Sargon to promote a violent ideological agenda.
The Newsweek editor knows that Glazer’s speech was the most listened to and discussed moment of the Oscars. There are few who read her tweeted comment that had not heard for themselves what Glazer said in his speech rather than the misinformation Ungar-Sargon peddled about it.
Lying about his remarks should have been an act of professional self-harm. It should have been a dark stain on her journalistic credibility. And yet Ungar-Sargon proudly left up her tweet, even as it received X’s humiliating “Readers added…” footnote exposing her deception.
I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone's soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, "We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness."
She did so because that tweet is her calling card. It declares her not a talented or careful journalist but as something far more useful: one who will do whatever is required to get ahead. Like Shmuley, she was projecting – in her case, with the accusation of “moral rot”. She was advertising that she lacks a moral compass, and that she is willing to do whatever is needed to advance establishment interests.
Like those who lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there will be no price to pay for these all-too-visible failings, or for promoting a catastrophe for a people whose lives and fate are of no import to the West.
Shmuley and Ungar-Sargon are determined to buttress the walled garden, shielding us from the suffering, the terrors, inflicted by the West just out of view.
These courtiers and charlatans must be shamed and shunned. We must listen instead to those like Glazer trying to tear down the wall to show us the reality outside.
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
This is the state of our nation that no is talking about—not the politicians, not the courts, and not Congress: the government’s power grabs are growing bolder, while the rights of the citizenry continue to be trampled underfoot.
Hitler is hiding in the shadows, while the citizenry—the only ones powerful enough to stem the authoritarian tide that threatens to lay siege to our constitutional republic—remain easily distracted and conveniently diverted by political theatrics and news cycles that change every few days.
This sorry truth has persisted no matter which party has controlled Congress or the White House.
These are dangerous times.
Yet while the presidential candidates talk at length about the dangers posed by the opposition party, the U.S. government still poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life.
Police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power: these are just a few of the ways in which the police state continues to flex its muscles in a show of force intended to intimidate anyone still clinging to the antiquated notion that the government answers to “we the people.”
Consider for yourself the state of our nation:
Americans have little protection against police abuse. The police and other government agents have been generally empowered to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What is increasingly common, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.
Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies with their secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities.
Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. Indeed, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.
Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. While the courts continue to disagree over the exact nature of the rights protected by the Second Amendment, the government itself has made its position extremely clear. When it comes to gun rights in particular, and the rights of the citizenry overall, the U.S. government has adopted a “do what I say, not what I do” mindset. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government’s attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one in self-defense. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.
Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.
Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school. Incredibly, the government continues to insist that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children to a public school. This growing tension over whether young people, especially those in the public schools, are essentially wards of the state, to do with as government officials deem appropriate, in defiance of the children’s constitutional rights and those of their parents, is at the heart of almost every debate over educational programming, school discipline, and the extent to which parents have any say over their children’s wellbeing in and out of school.
Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police forces. With local police agencies acquiring military-grade weaponry, training and equipment better suited for the battlefield, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts patrolled by a standing military army.
Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and euthanasia to forced blood draws, biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., Congress, the president and the courts have done little to nothing to counteract these abuses. Instead, they seem determined to accustom us to life in this electronic concentration camp.
Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered the age of authoritarianism, where all citizens are suspects, security trumps freedom, and so-called elected officials represent the interests of the corporate power elite. This topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.
Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.
I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.
This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past seventy-plus years regardless of their political affiliation.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We are walking a dangerous path right now.
Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.
Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.
The pickle we find ourselves in speaks volumes about the nature of the government beast we have been saddled with and how it views the rights and sovereignty of “we the people.”
Now you don’t hear a lot about sovereignty anymore. Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.
In other words, in America, “we the people”— sovereign citizens—call the shots.
So when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.
That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?
In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.
We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.
The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”
Worst of all, “we the people” have become desensitized to this constant undermining of our freedoms.
How do we reconcile the Founders’ vision of the government as an entity whose only purpose is to serve the people with the police state’s insistence that the government is the supreme authority, that its power trumps that of the people themselves, and that it may exercise that power in any way it sees fit (that includes government agents crashing through doors, mass arrests, ethnic cleansing, racial profiling, indefinite detentions without due process, and internment camps)?
They cannot be reconciled. They are polar opposites.
We are fast approaching a moment of reckoning where we will be forced to choose between the vision of what America was intended to be (a model for self-governance where power is vested in the people) and the reality of what it has become (a police state where power is vested in the government).
We are repeating the mistakes of history—namely, allowing a totalitarian state to reign over us.
Former concentration camp inmate Hannah Arendt warned against this when she wrote:
“No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination.”
So where does that leave us?
Aldous Huxley predicted that eventually the government would find a way of “making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
Despite Beijing’s maritime security priority, Yemen’s Red Sea ban on Israeli-linked shipping has boosted China’s regional standing while miring its US adversary in an unwinnable crisis.
The Gaza war’s expansion into the Red Sea has created an international maritime crisis involving a host of countries. Despite a US-led bombing campaign aimed at deterring Yemen’s Ansarallah-aligned navy from carrying out missile and drone strikes in the Red Sea, the armed forces continue to ramp up attacks and now are using “submarine weapons.”
As these clashes escalate dangerously, one of the world’s busiest bodies of water is rapidly militarizing. This includes the recent arrival to the Gulf of Aden of a Chinese fleet, including the guided-missile destroyer Jiaozuo, the missile frigate Xuchang, a replenishment vessel, and more than 700 troops – including dozens of special forces personnel – as part of a counter-piracy mission.
Beijing has voiced its determination to help restore stability to the Red Sea. “We should jointly uphold the security on the sea lanes of the Red Sea in accordance with the law and also respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries along the Red Sea coast, including Yemen,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi emphasized last month.
As the largest trading nation in the world, China depends on the Red Sea as its “maritime lifeline.” Most of the Asian giant’s exports to Europe go through the strategic waterway, and large quantities of oil and minerals that come to Chinese ports transit the body of water.
The Chinese have also invested in industrial parks along Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coasts, including the TEDA–Suez Zone in Ain Sokhna and the Chinese Industrial Park in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan City for Primary and Downstream Industries.
Chinese neutrality in West Asia
Prior to the sending of the 46th fleet of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy, Beijing’s response to Ansarallah’s maritime attacks had been relatively muted. China has since condemned the US–UK airstrikes against Ansarallah’s military capabilities in Yemen, and refused to join the western-led naval coalition, Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG).
China’s response to mounting tension and insecurity in the Red Sea is consistent with Beijing’s grander set of foreign policy strategies, which include respect for the sovereignty of nation-states and a doctrine of “non-interference.”
In the Persian Gulf, China has pursued a balanced and geopolitically neutral agenda resting on a three-pronged approach: enemies of no one, allies of no one, and friends of everyone.
China’s position vis-à-vis all Persian Gulf countries was best exemplified almost a year ago when Beijing brokered a surprise reconciliation agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, in which it played the role of guarantor.
In Yemen, although China aligns with the international community’s non-recognition of the Ansarallah-led government in Sanaa, Beijing has nonetheless initiated dialogues with those officials and maintained a non-hostile stance – unlike many Arab and western states.
Understanding Beijing’s regional role
Overall, China tries to leverage its influence in West Asian countries to mitigate regional tensions and advance stabilizing initiatives. Its main goal is ultimately to ensure the long-term success of President Xi Jinping’s multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and keep trade routes free of conflict.
Often labeled by the west as a “free rider,” China is accused of opportunistically benefiting from US- and European-led security efforts in the Persian Gulf and the northwestern Indian Ocean without contributing to them.
Beijing’s motivations for staying out of OPG were easy to understand: first, China has no interest in bolstering US hegemony; second, joining the naval military coalition could upset its multi-vector diplomacy vis-à-vis Ansarallah and Iran; and third, the wider Arab–Islamic world and the rest of the Global South would interpret it as Chinese support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
Rejecting the OPG mission has instead bolstered China’s regional image as a defender of the Palestinian cause.
Speaking to The Cradle, Javad Heiran-Nia, director of the Persian Gulf Studies Group at the Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies in Iran, said:
[Beijing’s] cooperation with the West in securing the Red Sea will not be good for China’s relations with the Arabs and Iran. Therefore, China has adopted political and military restraint to avoid jeopardizing its economic and diplomatic interests in the region.
Dropping the blame on Washington’s doorstep
Beijing recognizes the Red Sea security crisis to be a direct “spillover” from Gaza, where China has called for an immediate ceasefire.
As Yun Sun, co-director of the China Program at the Washington-based Stimson Center, informed The Cradle:
The Chinese do see the crisis in the Red Sea as a challenge to regional peace and stability but see the Gaza crisis as the fundamental origin of the crisis. Therefore, the solution to the crisis in the Chinese view will have to be based on ceasefire, easing of the tension and returning to the two-state solution.
Jean-Loup Samaan, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, agrees, telling The Cradle:
Chinese diplomats have been carefully commenting on the events, but in Beijing’s narrative, the rise of attacks is a consequence of Israel’s war in Gaza – and perhaps more importantly the US policy in support [of] the Netanyahu government.
But in January, after the US and UK began their bombing campaign of Ansarallah targets in Yemen, China began to weigh in with serious concerns about the Red Sea crisis. Beijing noted that neither Washington nor London had received authorization for the use of force from the UN Security Council, and, therefore, as Sun explained it, the US–UK strikes “lack legitimacy in the Chinese view.”
How the Red Sea Crisis benefits Beijing
China has capitalized on intensifying anger directed against the US from all over the Islamic world and Global South. The Gaza war and its spread into the Red Sea have delivered Beijing some easy soft-power gains and reinforced to Arab audiences the vital importance of multipolarity. This point was drummed home by Victor Gao, vice president of the Center for China and Globalization, when he told the 2023 Doha Forum:
The fact that there is only one single country which [on 8 December, 2023] vetoed the United Nations Security Council Resolution calling for ceasefire in the Israel-Palestine War should convince all of us that we should be very lucky living not in the unipolar World.
Certainly, China has experienced some economic repercussions from the Red Sea crisis, although the extent of this is difficult to calculate. Yet Beijing’s political gains appear to trump any associated financial losses. As Sun explained to The Cradle, “The crisis does affect China, but the loss has been mostly economic and minor, while the gains are primarily political as China stands with the Arab countries on Gaza.”
In some ways, China has actually gained economically from the Red Sea crisis. With Ansarallah making a point of only targeting Israel-linked vessels, there is a widespread view that Chinese ships operating in the area are immune from Yemeni attacks.
After many international container shipping lines decided to reroute around South Africa to avoid Ansarallah’s missiles and drones, two ships operating under the Chinese flag – the Zhong Gu Ji Lin and Zhong Gu Shan Dong – continued transiting the Red Sea. As Bloombergreported early this month:
Chinese-owned merchant ships are getting hefty discounts on their insurance when sailing through the Red Sea, another sign of how Houthi attacks in the area are punishing the commercial interests of vessels with ties to the West.
US officials have since implored Beijing to pressure Iran into ordering the de-facto Yemeni government to halt maritime attacks. Those entreaties have failed, however, largely because Washington incorrectly assumes that Beijing holds influence over Tehran and that Iran can make demands of Ansarallah. Regardless, the fact that the US would turn to China for such help amid escalating tensions in the Red Sea is a boost to Beijing’s status as a go-to power amid global security crises.
China also has much to gain from the White House’s disproportionate focus on Gaza and the Red Sea. Since October–November 2023, the US has had significantly less bandwidth for its South China Sea and Taiwan files. In turn, this frees Beijing to act more confidently in West Asia while the US remains distracted. According to Heiran-Nia:
The developments in the Red Sea will keep America’s focus on the region and not open America’s hand to expand its presence in the Indo–Pacific region, [where] America’s main priority is to contain China. The war in Ukraine has the same advantage for China. While the connectivity of the Euro–Atlantic region with the Indo–Pacific region is expanding to contain China and increase NATO cooperation with the Indo–Pacific, the tensions in [West Asia] and Ukraine will be a boon for China.
Ultimately, the Red Sea crisis and Washington’s failure to deter Ansarallah signal yet another blow to US hegemony. From the Chinese perspective, the growing Red Sea conflict serves to further isolate the US and highlight its limitations as a security guarantor – particularly in light of its unconditional support for Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza.
It is reasonable to call China a winner in the Red Sea crisis.
News-reports are so full of lies and misrepresentations about Jews, Israel, and the war in Gaza, as to be commonly propaganda that conveys falsehoods more than truths.
Two news-reports from Reuters on February 28th will be cited here as examples of such propaganda:
It was 10 minutes of shouted accusations of being a “genocide enabler” and having “blood on your hands” that made a British lawmaker fear for his safety over his decision to voice support for Israel in its war with Hamas.
Almost touching noses with his accuser before walking away and warning he would call the police, the opposition Labour Party member said the incident in a town in his constituency was just the latest of several that made him change his behaviour.
He now makes sure he sits near the door on public transport and limits meetings with the public.
“It feels like it could just need one spark to flip from someone giving you tuppence (criticism) in the street to escalating to actual violence,” the lawmaker said.
After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war in Gaza, more than 10 British politicians spoken to by Reuters said the abuse directed at them had become more intense. At least one cited this as a factor in deciding not to seek a new term in parliament in an election later this year.
Its underlying presumption (such as in “the Oct. 7 Hamas attack … sparked the war in Gaza,” which is intended to communicate the false impression that this war started on 7 October 2023 and so the aggressor in this war is the Gazans not the Israelis — and NOT at Israel’s founding in 1948 so that the aggressor is the Israelis, and the Palestinians are only reacting against that long-ongoing aggression) is that to be against Israel and to be for Palestinians, is to be anti-Semitic, but many Jews — including Albert Einstein and other prominent ones — have called Israel and its current leadership “racists” and “fascists” against the vast majority of the population in the area that in 1948 became “Israel”, which was originally called “Palestine” not “Israel” and was overwhelmingly Muslim not Jewish before Britain gave this land to the few Jews there and started Israel in 1948. Immediately, the racist-fascist Jews there, self-called “Zionists” as believers in the Jewish Scripture’s (Christian Old Testament’s) myth that ‘God’ gave it to them and ordered them to exterminate the then-current residents, carried out their biblically commanded ethnic cleansing war to clear the land for incoming Jews from European Christianity’s German-led Holocaust. For examples, Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 7:16 and 20:15 -18, have ‘God’ in that Scripture say that when the Israelites enter the promised land they are to exterminate the Canaanites, Hittites, Girgishites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, living there. So, Israel was founded by the far-right subsequently Likud Party leaders of Israel, such as Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, who led the extermination of entire Arab villages in the Nakba or “Catastrophe” as it’s called by Palestinians — the Palestinians’ equivalent to what for Jews the Holocaust had been. The Jews will never forget the Holocaust, just as the Palestinians will never forget the Nakba — but whereas the Nakba has continued with varying degrees of intensity ever since 1948 (culminating now in the Israel-America extermination of Gazans), the Holocaust ended in 1945.
It all goes back to 1948, the creation of Israel. Here’s from a lengthy article “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs” in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on 6 July 2019, about how Israel’s Government cleansed, eliminated, thousands of key documents, which remain unknown, but some scraps of which survived, such as, “And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages.”
As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.
Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.
We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
Consequently: many Jews are anti-Israel even though they profess themselves to be still Jews. Only bigots equate pro-Israel with being not anti-Semitic, and equate anti-Israel as being anti-Semitic (or anti-Jews). There is, in reality, no equation whatsoever between anti-Israel and anti-Jew. Only propaganda claims or implies any such false equation.
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 [1948], terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.
‘News’-reports such as that one from Reuters, which imply that every Jew is a Zionist (supports Israel), and that only anti-Semites condemn Israel, are arrant lies. They deceive for political purposes. That is propaganda. It forced the progressive leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn out of power and out of politics in Britain. So: these are extremely potent lies. This Reuters ‘news’-report opens with a large photo of marchers in Britain holding up the star of David and the flags of Israel and Britain, and “Never Again Is Now” signs, suggesting that to oppose Israel’s genocide of Gazans is to be anti-Semitic — is to be bigoted against Jews. This is mass-mind-control by Reuters, to make Brits think that they ought to side with the Israelis against the Gazans, and to therefore support Israel’s genocide of Gazans (as, somehow, being a justifiable response to the 7 October 2023 Hamas-Gazan attack against Israelis).
A subtler lie in it is that the war in Gaza started on 7 October 2023, instead of in 1948. The reality is that the 7 October 2023 event was the victims’ crying out, to the entire world, to call public attention to their living in the world’s largest (and constantly under siege by their prison-guards) open-air prison, Gaza, that they’re born into and permanently sentenced to, by Israel. It’s not where they want to live, no more than any prison anywhere is. But, after 7 October 2023, Israel decided to eliminate the Gazans and labelled this Israel-America genocide of Gazans partnership a ‘war against Hamas’ — which is yet another lie that the media publish without question, without shame, and purely as propaganda from and about Israel.
Also on February 28th, Reuters headlined “Michigan’s strong ‘uncommitted’ vote shows Israel impact on Biden support” and opened “DEARBORN, Michigan/WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Joe Biden’s campaign and top Democratic officials vowed to double down on efforts to win over voters as the U.S. president aims to solve conflicts in the Middle East, after Michigan registered a stronger-than-anticipated protest vote over his support of Israel.” It included this line from Biden’s campaign — with no question (far less rebuttal) being presented about it: “Biden’s campaign will continue to ‘make our case in the state – to both uncommitted voters and the entire Michigan constituency,’ a senior campaign official said as the results were tallied. ‘The President will continue to work for peace in the Middle East.’” But actually, as Politico had headlined on February 13th, “US won’t punish Israel for Rafah op that doesn’t protect civilians” and it said that the Biden Administration has informed the Netanyahu Administration that if it decides that it has no practicable way to expel the Gazans to foreign lands (which Israel’s Government — assisted by America’s Government — has been trying to do ever since October 16th) then the U.S. Government will not punish Israel if it simply slaughters all of them. “No reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm [Politico’s euphemism for slaughter] civilians without facing American consequences [meaning punishment]. More than half of the enclave’s 2.3 million population has fled to Rafah.” So: that would entail slaughtering 1.15 million Gazans there. The Politico article made no mention of what would be done with the 1.15 million survivors, the Gazans who haven’t yet gotten to Raffah, but if Netanyahu would halt the extermination program at that point, a rationale for discontinuing the operation there would be hard if not impossible to imagine — at least inasmuch as half of Gazans would then already have been slaughtered by Israel.
And this slaughter of Gazans is being done with U.S.-made weapons and military intelligence, and so it is actually a joint U.S. and Israeli operation. As Israel’s Jewish News Service reported on November 27th:
Israel’s dependence on the United States was stated bluntly by retired IDF Maj. General Yitzhak Brick in an interview earlier this week.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
From 7 October 2023 up through 23 December 2023, the U.S. Government shipped to Israel 10,000 tons of U.S. weaponry and ammunition; and Biden has pressed harder on Congress to authorize an additional $14 billion of such assistance to be donated by U.S. taxpayers, to Israel, in order to complete what it’s doing to Gaza — whatever that may turn out to be — than he has ever pressed Congress to approve anything (except donating even more weapons and intelligence to Ukraine too). And, then, on January29th, YNET News, the most popular internet portal in Israel, headlined “Global ammunition shortage forces Israel to limit bombings”, and they reported that “Over 25,000 tons of weapons have been delivered to Israel via approximately 280 aircraft and 40 ships from the U.S. since the onset of the conflict.” So, obviously, Biden, rather than being “The President [who] will continue to work for peace in the Middle East,” is instead actually an equal partner along with Netanyahu, in carrying out this Israel-U.S.-planned genocide. How many of Reuters’s readers know this fact? Furthermore, that Reuters article likewise stated (without pointing out the absurd lie) that “the U.S. president aims to solve conflicts in the Middle East.” How can that be? Perhaps he intends to ship yet more billions of dollars worth of U.S.-made taxpayer-donated weapons to Israel in order to enforce that ‘peace’ — the ‘peace’ of the graveyard. So sayeth Reuters, at any rate. And believeth its readers? But that is the mainstream ‘news’-‘reporting’, and this certainly is NOT. What is the reality? And why does the opposite side hide it? And who are paying them to hide it?
Which people actually control a ‘democracy’: the people who fund political propaganda, or the people whose votes are swayed by it? If a country is controlled by contending factions between the billionaires — such as Democratic ones versus Republican ones — is that a democracy? If it’s instead an aristocracy, is there any way to overthrow and replace it by a democracy, other than to have an authentic revolution?
“Who Owns the World” is the title of an extraordinary documentary, describing how Big-Big Money controls not only every aspect of your life, but has a stranglehold on every government, the political UN body, as well as every UN agency, and all industries and services of this globe.
These largest investors are BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.
These same investment groups also control over 90% of the world’s major media. Even Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is majority owned by BlackRock / Vanguard. It is therefore no miracle that hardly any news penetrates the walls of secrecy about these major shareholders of every aspect of human life and life-related activities and businesses.
It is a monopoly that can literally not be opposed by traditional means. They have also invented the “rules-based order” — overruling every international and national law at their will. They know no limits, no ethics and adhere to no human or human rights standard. POWER is them.
The two most powerful investors and investment managers are BlackRock and Vanguard. They are closely linked, to the point where their management is largely inter-changeable. Vanguard is BlackRock’s largest shareholder, meaning that they control BlackRock.
Though Vanguard is not transparent about its own shareholders, Vanguard is owned by the richest families on earth. Vanguard has been created to hide their investments and money transactions.
Through non-profit organizations, like the Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation, Rothschild Foundation, JPMorgan Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Bush Foundation, Albert DuPont Charity Trust – and so on, billions of “donation” money is transferred – tax-free – to Vanguard, a shield for their potentially criminal transactions and funding.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest funder of WHO. It also controls GAVI, the vaxx-alliance – and is therefore the most influential organization over human health – and death.
These same people, alias Foundations, also own Blackrock – which is why BlackRock and Vanguard are interchangeable or can act as one, if it is to their advantage.
According to Bloomberg, by 2028, the two will own / manage some 20 trillion dollars – about a fifth of the current world GDP.
If joined by State Street, as is often the case, the world’s fourth largest investment manager, you may add another US$ 3 to US$ 4 trillion of managed assets. Sometimes they are joined by Berkshire Hathaway, City Bank, Bank of America, Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs… adding another few trillion of managed assets to their pie.
However, these second or third ranking financial institutions, in turn, are also owned by BlackRock and Vanguard. One might call it an omnipotent vicious circle from which it is almost impossible to escape.
With that power they can leverage every country in the world, every institution, and every corporation – as they are the largest shareholders of the industrial, military, service and infrastructure investment machine that makes the world turn.
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Please allow just a little detour to Gaza, where the Zionist racist massacre of an entire population has been going on as today for 141 days. Some 30,000 Palestinian have been killed; 70% children and women. Children and women are the prime targets, because children are the next generation and women are the bearer of the next generation – they must be eliminated by the supremacist Zionists.
The horror and inhumanity have no words, cannot be appropriately described with our human vocabulary: Bombs have liquidated an entire family. The mutilated body of a seven-year-old girl, Sidra, is hanging from a wall. Hind, a six-year-old girl, was mercilessly killed by Israeli armed forces, as she was begging for help from an ambulance, surrounded by the cadavers of her killed family. As illustrated by “Hildebrandt”, a Peruvian, renowned non-mainstream news media (23 February 2024).
Tell me, please, are these all-powerful financial conglomerates not powerful enough to stop this massacre at once? They hold entire nations hostage to do their bidding, but they cannot stop Israel, the Zionists behind the State of Israel, from their merciless atrocious killing, murder, massacre of an entire population?
Are they powerful enough to preventing the United States, their Anglosaxon and European puppet governments from halting their money, weapon, and “moral” support of the Zionist onslaught? – Or is their power behind the US veto breaking the UN Security Council’s quest for a Ceasefire in Gaza?
In any case, by not using their power to stop the Zionist war against Palestine, to stop any war, any killing in the world, are they not complicit in the mass-murders in Gaza and around the world by not ending them?
They could. Why are they not doing it?
They are drunk with Power – and as we know, power and money have been derailing humanity for a long time – but now the extent of shame and barbarism has reached a level, where our civilization risks to disappear; and where there is no way to escape – not the traditional ways.
BlackRock / Vanguard are also major shareholders in the secondary and tertiary asset management and banking institutions. So, they control the managed investments of, say, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, City, Chase, Morgan-Stanley – you name it.
If you invest, for example, in a food conglomerate, like Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, most have no idea that they invest in BlackRock / Vanguard, major shareholders of these food corporations, and by doing so, they also invest in the worldwide military industrial (killing) complex which is too is controlled by BlackRock / Vanguard.
BlackRock / Vanguard / State Street are also the powers behind the power – most often invisible. For example, BlackRock has close links with many Central Banks, especially with the Federal Reserve.
They lend money to the FED – and are a principal adviser to the FED and most likely to other central banks, including they advise on computer systems they use and which connects them.
BlackRock, is by far the largest influencer and donor, or “partner”, as they prefer to call themselves, therefore, also “commander”, of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the entire UN system, its political arm, as well as its sub-agencies – and by proxy, also the World Health Organization (WHO) – and not to forget GAVI, the Vaccination Association, physically located just next door to WHO – and by further extension, Big-Pharma, the pharma industry.
Together with their faithful think-alike executer of WEF’s mandates, Mr. Klaus Schwab, as well as the multibillionaires, such as the Gates, Rockefellers, Soros’ of this world, one can easily deduct – they – BlackRock and Co. – control our lives – health and death.
Through their world-domineering ownership of all that moves, shakes, and produces, they are globalists, eugenists and “green-agenda” eccentrics – pushing the climate change lie – come hell or high water. Costs in money and lives do not matter.
Were these financial monsters behind the covid-plandemic idea? What a question!
Their agenda – eugenist, destruction of current economic structures to rebuild according to this small elite’s criteria – is clearly spelled out by the Club of Rome’s (CoR) “Limits to Growth” (1972), and the follow-on Report “The First Global Revolution” (1991) which claims early on in its text that annihilation of the current system is a MUST, to rebuild, bringing the fundamental changes in favor of the elite – with eugenics and absolute control always in the fore.
Is the CoR at the service of the global financial empire? After all, the same powers are behind both.
Not by coincidence, the Rockefeller Group is the inventor of the Club of Rome, today comfortably seated, tax free and with full diplomatic immunity, in Switzerland.
The fake Covid plandemic is the first building block for this all-destructive mechanism, the “corner stone’ of destruction, so to speak. The lockdowns, the inhuman, totally invalid PCR tests, the fear-mongering – the invented covid-death rates – were very effective in manipulating people, but also in laying the groundwork for the overall annihilation of our society and even civilization, in shifting assets from the bottom to the top – and in abolishing the world economy that carries our civilization.
Once the people were shivering from fear, the deadly “vaxxes” were introduced. Lo and behold, by now, despite ever-louder opposition – about 5.7 billion people – out of the world’s 8 billion (more than 70%) have received at least one jab – and most got 2 or 3 injections.
These poisonous injections are in the human bodies and may most likely react sooner or later. According to Mike Yeadon, former VP and Chief scientist of Pfizer – over the next three to ten years, the death-toll will increase probably drastically, but most people will not link it to the “vaxxes” — either because they have been indoctrinated that deaths are due to long or late covid, or because they suffer from and live in cognitive dissonance.
WEF’s Chairman, Klaus Schwab’s top advisor, Israeli Professor, Yuval Noah Harari, asks openly what to do with the “useless eaters” when their “raison d’être” has ben replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Giving them a base salary for (temporary) survival, getting them hooked on violent video games to prep them for the future, and to let them gradually “disappear”? —–
In addition to severe human injuries and death, the vaxxes also reduce male and female fertility, cause miscarriages, highly aggressive and lethal turbo-cancers, and if course, myocardities and sudden deaths.
Overall excess mortality in the west is as high as 20% in some countries. In the UK, where excess deaths are alarming the common public, they have started modifying statistics to erase surplus mortality.
In parallel, mostly funded by the Soros Open Society Foundation, the Woke movement is ravaging the western world, with promotion of sex changes – and the infamous “multi-letter” agenda – LGBTQIA+ = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual. WOW! – This is promoted in schools, in some countries with strict bans of parents’ interference in their children’s, as young as 11 years, wishes for sex-change.
This agenda reduces birth rates further.
Endless wars – create chaos, confusion, desperation and, of course, also deaths.
The Money Masters have succeeded in creating the first building blocks. WHO may soon become the most powerful health (life and death) tyranny on earth, if the infamous Pandemic Treaty and the harshly modified International Health Regulations (IHR) are approved at the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA) in May 2024.
Knowing who is in possession and control of WHO and the WHA, the world is called upon to exit WHO. Internationally renowned Dr Peter McCullough testified in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, about the social and economic consequences of covid vaxxes, as well as the potentially impending WHO tyranny – concluding with a call on the EU and the US – and the rest of the world to exit WHO.
To retake the world, by We the People, leaving BlackRock, Vanguard & Co. behind, exiting the UN system and WHO – would be the next step. Most important, and possibly the only way defeating this money power, is withdrawing from the current societal system and start afresh.
Small communal economies – as far away as possible from any digitization – with a dynamic cooperation among themselves, evolving naturally and on a higher spiritual level than the low vibrating one which is typical for our material world and the present strive for ever more material goods.
“Only when we are divided, can the elite retain its power over us.”
“The Wound is the Place, where the Light enters You”. By the great Sufi poet, Rumi
Their weapons are blackmail and fear.
WE MUST NOT FEAR.
We are the 99%.
We can do it.
And we MUST do it for survival of humanity.
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020) Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Carlo Rovelli is a renowned Italian theoretical physicist and writer who has made important contributions to the physics of space and time. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute, and a core member of Canada’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy of Western University, working mainly in the field of quantum gravity. His short book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014), has been translated into 41 languages and has sold over one million copies worldwide.
In his 2021 book, Helgoland – The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics, Rovelli describes a surprising epiphany in his efforts to understand the mysteries of quantum physics:
‘In my own attempts to make sense of quanta for myself, I have wandered among the texts of philosophers in search of a conceptual basis for understanding the strange picture of the world provided by this incredible theory. In doing so, I have found many fine suggestions and acute criticisms, but nothing wholly convincing.
‘Until one day I came across a work that left me amazed.’ (Rovelli, Penguin, e-book version, 2021, p.72)
Remarkably, the book in question is a key 3rd century text of Buddhist metaphysics, The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, by the enlightened mystic Nāgārjuna. Rovelli writes:
‘The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else. The resonance with quantum physics is immediate. Obviously, Nāgārjuna knew nothing, and could not have imagined anything, about quanta – that is not the point. The point is that philosophers offer original ways of rethinking the world…’. (p.73)
Rovelli is wrong to describe Nāgārjuna as a ‘philosopher’; he was a mystic. Philosophers seek solutions through thought; mystics seek solutions by transcending thought. If Nāgārjuna was engaged in ‘rethinking the world’, it was in the cause of a truth that can be experienced only when thinking is paused. Rovelli writes:
‘The illusoriness of the world, its samsara, is a general theme of Buddhism; to recognise this is to reach nirvana, liberation and beatitude.’
Here Rovelli is placing the cart before the horse: ‘liberation and beatitude’ are not reached by recognising ‘the illusoriness of the world’; rather, the illusoriness of the way we see the world is recognised as the endpoint of a process of liberation and beatitude.
This process is meditation. The fact that Rovelli does not mention the words ‘meditation’, ‘meditator’, or ‘meditate’ in his book, indicates he is currently limited to an intellectual understanding of nirvana and of the path (which is no-path) by which it is attained. In Buddhism, the ‘wisdom’ aspect of ‘the path’ – intellectually exploring the illusoriness of phenomena – is supported by the ‘method’ aspect of meditation. Together, these are the two ‘wings’ on which the bird of enlightenment takes flight.
In fact, the Buddha did not say the world is an ‘illusion’; he said that the world does not exist in the way it appears to exist to us; that our deep-seated belief that the world is made up of independently existing objects is an illusion. There are many Zen and other stories in which masters tweak students’ noses, or hit them over the head, asking: ‘Is that an illusion?’
Rovelli does a good job of explaining how apparently concrete objects vanish on close inspection. We naturally imagine that a chair, for example, exists as a single object, a unit. In fact, what we call ‘a chair’ is made up of a seat, legs, a back rest and so on. None of the legs is ‘a chair’; nor is the seat; nor is the back rest. None of the parts that make up a chair is ‘the chair’. It turns out that the unitary chair, which seemed so solid, is a mere label applied to a set of parts.
But to say the chair is made of parts is also misleading, because it suggests that the parts, at least, are solid, unitary objects. Alas, the parts also disappear on close inspection. Thus, the seat might be made up of a wooden frame with a cushion in the middle – neither of these are ‘a seat’. And, of course, all such objects are made of atoms. An ‘atom’ is also a collection: of neutrons, protons, electrons and sub-atomic particles. None of these is ‘an atom’. An ‘atom’ is also a mere label applied to a collection. Everywhere we reach out for solid ‘things’ that disappear into thin air that is also just a label.
Why should any of this concern me as an obviously solid, unitary self? If someone shouts abuse at me – it’s happened once or twice on twitter.com – I feel as if I’ve been impacted by an insulting barb. Apparently a solid entity, ‘me’, has been hit. Otherwise, why would I feel pain?
But when I search for a dart board-like entity that has been struck, I find that none of my body parts, none of my thoughts and none of my emotions are a unitary self called ‘me’. This presumed unit is also a mere label. But how can an insulting barb wound a label, a mere idea? Shouldn’t it pass right through? The answer is that it hurts because we believe deeply in a solid self that doesn’t actually exist. We are therefore co-authors of the insult, the pain.
So, is everything really just a collection of mental labels? Is nothing real? Consider dreams: on one level, they are clearly illusions. But they are real as illusions. To be more precise, the awareness that perceives an illusion or dream is real – awareness is required for the dream to be experienced.
Indeed, even if the whole world is a dream, the awareness that perceives the dream is real. And, as discussed, nirvana is not reached merely by intellectually recognising ‘the illusoriness of the world’; it is discovered when the true nature of this awareness, of being, is experienced. But how might that happen?
‘Nothingness’ Is Not Empty
Just as physical objects – chairs, planets, stars – appear in external space, sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions appear in the internal space of awareness. The thoughts, ideas and memories that make up our idea of ‘me’ are all ‘objects’ in this inner space. We think we’re ‘the voice in our head’, but we’re actually the ‘space’, the witness of ‘the voice’.
What is the fundamental nature of this awareness? We know from experience that when angry thoughts and emotions appear in awareness, we suffer. Likewise, when fearful, anxious and jealous thoughts appear. Many of us imagine that awareness without any thoughts, like external space, would be a blank, empty nothingness.
According to the Upanishads, the ancient scriptures of Hinduism dating back to 800 years BC, this is not the case at all. The Upanishads argue that both the internal space of awareness and external space are manifestations of Brahman, the formless, changeless source of all material forms:
‘We should consider that in the inner world Brahman is consciousness; and we should consider that in the outer world Brahman is space.’ (Juan Mascaró trans., The Upanishads, Penguin, 1965, p.115)
This is significant and, in fact, testable, because Brahman is said to be in the nature of awareness and bliss. In other words, consciousness – even the consciousness waiting at a rainy bus stop on a chilly winter’s morning – is in the nature of bliss. But if that’s true, why are we conscious beings so miserable at the bus stop and in so many other situations? The answer is that man and woman were born free but are everywhere in chains of thought.
What we in the West mis-label ‘meditation’ (which actually suggests its exact opposite, thinking) is the art of uncovering the fundamental nature of awareness by reducing and eventually dropping the thought by which it is obscured.
Anyone can relax in a comfortable chair for an hour paying attention to whatever feelings are present in the heart area and lower belly. Naturally, thoughts will blaze away. This is exactly as it should be and is not in any way wrong. Instead of following these chains of thought as usual: ‘He was so patronising… and she didn’t defend me at all… What I should have said is…’ Instead of riding this train of thought, we try to notice the thoughts and return to feeling.
This goes on and on: we’re managing to focus attention on feeling, we suddenly start riding thought, suddenly realise what we’re doing and return to feeling. If we do this consistently, on a daily basis, one day, after about 40-45 minutes, the mind grows weary of generating thoughts that aren’t being properly appreciated and starts to lose momentum.
Less thoughts are now appearing, and we may have a subtle sense that we are sailing in calmer waters. Following this, actual gaps can start to appear in the thought stream allowing us to focus with clarity on feelings in the heart and lower belly. These gaps – moments of awareness unclouded by thought – are experienced as tiny, golden sparks of love, bliss and peace. This is a revolutionary moment – it is quite astonishing that, having been half-asleep and chaotically distracted, we are suddenly happier sitting doing nothing than we have been in years and decades.
The arising of these sparks is often heralded by unusually generous thoughts; we suddenly have an impulse to be kind to someone in some way, even to an enemy. This is a sure sign that something odd is happening. These sparks then deepen and intensify and may endure for hours or days. Initially, though, they are vulnerable to intense mental activity – a post-meditation Twitterspat will rapidly extinguish them. Enlightened mystics, by contrast, live in a state of permanent ecstasy and love. Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching, said:
‘The Tao [love and bliss] doesn’t come and go.
It is always present everywhere,
just like the sky.
If your mind is clouded,
you won’t see it,
but that doesn’t mean
it isn’t there.
All misery is created
by the activity of the mind.
Can you let go of words and ideas,
attitudes, and expectations?
If so, then the Tao will loom into view.
Can you be still and look inside?
If so, then you will see that the truth
is always available, always responsive.’ (Lao Tzu, Brian Browne Walker trans., Hua Hu Ching – The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu, e-book, St Martin’s Press, 2012, p.39)
Be still and look inside – it is as simple as that. But it is advice that has been ignored by most people for millennia.
Rovelli concludes:
‘But Nāgārjuna’s emptiness also nourishes an ethical stance that clears the sky of the endless disquietude: to understand that we do not exist as autonomous entities helps us free ourselves from attachments and suffering. Precisely because of its impermanence, because of the absence of any absolute, the now has meaning and is precious.’
Yes, intellectually reflecting on our lack of solidity and impermanence can help dissolve the perceived importance of our attachments. But what reduces our attachments and self-importance to nothing, if only temporarily at first, is the dazzling love and bliss that arise in meditation. The ‘now’ isn’t just precious because it is impermanent; it is precious because the experience of the ‘now’ unobscured by thought is overflowing with ecstasy and love that make all worldly attachments seem trivial. The Indian mystic Osho said:
‘When ego [thought] is not, love comes as a perfume – as a flowering of your heart… With this attitude, when the mind is completely unmoving, something of the divine will lure you; you will have glimpses.
‘Once you know the bliss of such glimpses, you will know the nonsense, the absurdity, and the absolutely unnecessary misery of ambition. Then the mind stops by itself. It becomes completely still, silent, nonachieving.’
The American mystic Robert Adams said:
‘I felt a love, a compassion, a humility, all at the same time. That was truly indescribable. It wasn’t a love that you’re aware of. Think of something that you really love, or someone that you really love with all your heart. Multiply this by a jillion million trillion, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.’ (Adams, Silence of the Heart – Dialogues With Robert Adams, Acropolis Books, 1999, pp.9-10)
Rovelli continues:
‘For me as a human being, Nāgārjuna teaches the serenity, the lightness and the shining beauty of the world: we are nothing but images of reality. Reality, including ourselves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which… there is nothing.’ (p.75)
One can sense the anxiety in these words. Rovelli perceives ‘the shining beauty of the world’, but it is a cold, austere beauty because it appears to him to be a ‘thin and fragile veil’, beyond which lies ‘nothing’. But we have already agreed that ‘there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else everything is interdependent’. Indeed so, we are there as the witness of ‘nothing’. (p.73). Osho explained:
‘In English there is no word to translate the Buddhist word shunyata. In that “nothingness” … it is not empty, it is full of your witness, full of your witnessing, full of the light of your witness.’
We are not brains in jars or ivory towers. This paradoxically full ‘nothing’ is not a mere concept for Rovelli to ponder intellectually; it is an existential challenge for him to face and feel. Jiddu Krishnamurti put it well:
‘We have all had the experience of tremendous loneliness, where books, religion, everything is gone and we are tremendously, inwardly, lonely, empty. Most of us can’t face that emptiness, that loneliness, and we run away from it. Dependence is one of the things we run to, depend on, because we can’t stand being alone with ourselves. We must have the radio or books or talking, incessant chatter about this and that, about art and culture. So we come to that point when we know there is this extraordinary sense of self-isolation.
‘We may have a very good job, work furiously, write books, but inwardly there is this tremendous vacuum. We want to fill that and dependence is one of the ways. We use dependence, amusement, church work, religions, drink, women [or men], a dozen things to fill it up, cover it up. If we see that it is absolutely futile to try to cover it up, completely futile, not verbally, not with conviction and therefore agreement and determination, but if we see the total absurdity of it, then we are faced with a fact…. Why don’t I face the fact and see what happens?
‘The problem now arises of the observer and the observed. The observer says, “I am empty; I don’t like it” and runs away from it. The observer says, “I am different from the emptiness.” But the observer is the emptiness; it is not emptiness seen by an observer. The observer is the observed. There is a tremendous revolution in thinking, in feeling, when that takes place.’ (Krishnamurti, The Book of Life, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, p.84)
The crucial point about this ‘nothingness’, then, is that we are standing here as witnesses; it is a witnessed nothing. The witness is not a thing – it is no-thing – but it is existent, real. And it is anything but ‘thin and fragile’. It turns out that the observer is the observed: it is the fundamental nature of the universe and it is in the nature of consciousness, love and bliss.
How remarkable: the next step for quantum physics, for Rovelli himself, is to recognise the ‘nothingness’ within; to see how we stuff it with knowledge; and to experiment in dropping that knowledge, in dropping all thought, in the cause of facing that abyss.
Such a confrontation could herald a revolution in human consciousness: a union of physics and mysticism, of science and love.
After the Crash 