Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Saturday Matinee: One Eyed Jacks

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One Eyed Jacks

Hollywood Century, 1961: In which things start to get out of hand

By Tim Brayton

Source: Alternate Ending

The one thing that can never be claimed of the 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks is that it’s like other movies. Lumbering and bloated, often compelling, always gorgeous, and at times astonishingly bizarre in its attempt to force the psychological impulses of mid-century naturalist theater acting into the framework of a bog-standard Western revenge thriller, I haven’t decided whether or not it “works”, though I am inclined to say it does. But this is the kind of film in which functioning according to any conventional metric was out of the question long before the filming wrapped and the final cut was issued into theaters, and its considerable fascinations are mostly disconnected from its objective quality or lack thereof.

The film began life as a screenplay by Samuel Fuller, adapting Charles Neider’s novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, to be directed by Stanley Kubrick, then just emerging from his enfant terrible years, and starring Marlon Brando. It certainly did not end up that way. When the film entered production in the second half of 1958, Brando’s early career as cinema’s most famous practitioner of Method acting had just begun its slow but steady drift into the wobbly and weird middle period, where he seemed more interested in indulging unspoken private whims than serving the needs of the picture (for a more graphic depiction of this process, I would point you to the actor’s next released film after One-Eyed Jacks, the marvelously clumsy 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty). To put it a little more bluntly, Brando had begun his irrevocably slide into becoming a prima donna of the first order. Kubrick had ego problems of his own, of course, as would shortly be thrown in to the sharpest relief on the production of Spartacus, but in the late ’50s, there was no question who was going to win. Brando was one of the biggest names the movies had, and he pulled rank over Kubrick at every turn; eventually, the conflict between the men resulted in Kubrick leaving the production, either because he simply couldn’t stand to be around his star any longer, or because Brando demanded that he be fired.

This left a movie with no clear direction and an in-progress rewrite by Calder Willingham, and nobody in charge to make things right; eventually, Brando assumed the role of director himself, for the first and only time in his career, extensively re-working the screenplay with yet a third writer, Guy Trosper (he and Willingham received final credit onscreen). It would be easy to regard the finished product as a vanity project, and in a lot of ways, that’s precisely what it is. Undoubtedly, there’s no missing that it’s a first-time effort by a man who didn’t necessarily want to direct (the film’s box office failure certainly hurt Brando’s future dreams in that direction if he had them, though I feel like a man of his stature could have finagled another directing assignment somewhere in all the years to come, if he’d been inclined), though it also doesn’t feel lazy or slapdash. Without having ever seen the film, I had rather assumed it would resemble secondhand Elia Kazan set in the West, Kazan being the director most responsible for shaping Brando into the cinematic figure he became. But there’s barely a trace of any such influence in a film that gives itself over to plenty of poetic, narratively fuzzy sequences in which the stillness and peace of the outdoors trumps anything to do with character or plot (and there would have allegedly been plenty more of them in Brando’s original cut, running well in excess of four hours; Paramount carved it down to two hours and 21 minutes, and neither the studio nor the actor-director were happy with that process).

Brando was lucky to have a seasoned old vet to help him shape the visuals: One-Eyed Jacks was shot by Charles Lang, a great and varied cinematographer who worked in everything from light comedy to film noir to character drama, and made visual successes out of material that wouldn’t seem to require any visual sensibility at all (he triumphed on what must have been the immensely thankless job of filming Some Like It Hot, a screenplay-dominated movie if one ever existed). Westerns are, of course, the exact opposite of movies that don’t require strong visuals, and his contribution to One-Eyed Jacks is the glue that holds everything together no matter how badly the drama wants to strain apart or, more often, dissolve into a fog of aimlessness. This is a film with a truly inspiring amount of depth to its compositions and blocking: how much of that was Brando’s theater-honed sensibility, how much was Lang’s desire to show off, how much was simply the sheer power of collaboration, it’s not mine to say. The results are what matter, and the result is a film that constantly offers to pull us in, through the action, into the rooms, and to appreciate the spaces between characters and what that says about their motivations and relative domination of any given moment. It is as impressively three-dimensional as any actual 3-D movie I’ve ever seen. And that’s without even pausing to mention the gorgeous use of color, the penetrating blue of the sky and the dusty, out-of-time feeling to the ground and the interiors.

Anyway, One-Eyed Jacks is something of a visual masterpiece, which I don’t mean as a slight, or as a backhanded compliment. Westerns, as much as any genre, tend to live or die on the quality of their images, which often do a lot of the heavy lifting for defining characters and conflict and themes and emotions. And so it is with this movie, where the way that people exist in the context of their environment tell us more about them than what they say or how they say it. And this is useful to the film, since it is in a lot ways a very stiff and unconvincing piece of storytelling.

Anyway, here’s the idea behind it: there are two bank robbers, Rio (Brando), and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden, whose casting was a chief sticking point between Kubrick and Brando). They’re being chased outside of Sonora, Mexico, in 1880, by the Rurales; Dad promises to get fresh horses and return for Rio, but he simply chickens out, leaving his partner to be taken by the law and imprisoned for five years, till he escapes. At that point, Rio teams up with fellow inmate Chico Modesto (Larry Duran) and the clearly untrustworthy Bob Amory (Ben Johnson), and tracks Dad to Monterey, California, where the turncoat has established himself as the much-loved sheriff, with a beautiful Mexican wife, Maria (Katy Jurado), and a beautiful stepdaughter, Louisa (Pina Pellicer). Eager for revenge on all fronts, Rio plots to steal from the Monterey bank to humiliate Dad and seduce Louisa to symbolically cuckold him, but then he goes and falls in love with the girl instead. And after Dad administers a terrible injury to his hand, and he has a chance to think for weeks while he recuperates, Rio begins to reconsider everything he has planned.

There’s absolutely no obvious reason under the sun for this to take 141 minutes, and One-Eyed Jacks doesn’t provide any non-obvious ones. It’s an indulgent film, is all: full of lengthy, go-nowhere scenes that allow Brando and his co-stars to bat dialogue and situations back and forth in longueurs that I suppose resemble Actors Studio exercises, or something those lines; there’s an aimlessness to the rhythm of scenes for which the only possible justification is that it “feels like life”, not that it in any way works dramatically. And, too, a lot of the film consists of the camera resting on Brando, doing a lot of small-scale business to show off his character and what he’s thinking about. A little bit of it goes a long way, and it doesn’t help that Brando’s performance is nowhere near one of his best: he strands himself with an accent that’s so off-base it’s rather more funny than anything, and threads the script with the most bluntly obvious “overthrowing the father” metaphor imaginable (for serious, Malden’s character has the given name “Dad”?) that provides very little to play that isn’t flat and obvious.

The acting as a whole is a mixed bag, which surprised me a little – apparently, Brando-the-director spent most of his time helping Pellicer into her character and out of her pants, and not to much of an end: she still gives the stiffest performance in the movie with the least modulation of her line deliveries, and only comes alive when she gets to play bigger, negative emotions. The rest of the cast range from excellent (Malden’s flop-sweating authority, Slim Pickens in a remarkable reined-in performance of admirable nastiness) to simply mediocre (Brando himself), and given the film’s obvious desire to be a modernist psychological drama in Western trappings, the inconsistency of the characterisations is a real problem.

The good thing, then, is that One-Eyed Jacks works best when it’s not the film it openly wants to be, and instead can be some kind of weird fever dream of clashing tones and visual abstraction. Especially in its opening quarter or so, the film induces a kind of whiplash in its extreme fluctuations of mood from scene to scene, and cut to cut; it’s laid back here, angry here, mildly comic here, tense here, thoughtful here, and all within five minutes. There’s a deranged electricity to it that’s not exactly the same (or even in the same wheelhouse) as solid genre filmmaking, but it’s a movie with real, palpable ambition to find new, challenging, different things to do with the form. Its radicalism has been overstated by its partisans (psychologically deep Westerns, and Westerns fronted by antiheroes, weren’t exactly new news in 1961), and so has its effectiveness, but that the film is brassy and unique is pretty much beyond dispute. It’s symptomatic in some ways of the bloat and loss of focus that marks so much Hollywood filmmaking of the 1960s, but it would be a lot harder to consider that a problem if every one of those bloated epics of the period had such demented, unpredictable personality as Brando’s captivating folly.

Arab regimes collude with Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza

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By By Jean Shaoul

Source: Defend Democracy Press

As Israel’s fascist government prepares to launch a massive ground invasion to take over Rafah city, discussions are now under way about setting up 15 campsites—each with around 25,000 tents—across the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip, to house the million-plus Palestinians that have taken refuge in the city.

These tent cities are to be funded by the United States and Arab despots and operated by the butcher of Cairo, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt and other Arab regimes are in effect providing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the ability to claim he has assured the “safe passage” he said he would provide so that the planned ground invasion could take place. As Netanyahu again declared as Israel mounted a massive aerial bombardment of the city, his real goal is “total victory”—which means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest into the desert.

That such proposals could even be discussed with the Arab regimes confirms that their collusion with Israel’s genocidal offensive against Gaza, from day one, has now become direct participation in its ethnic cleansing through a second Nakba.

Israel has already killed at least 29,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, buried thousands more under the rubble, and displaced approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people. The majority are now sheltering in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt where they face famine, lack access to clean water and medical care and the imminent prospect of extermination.

Egypt: Israel’s border guard

Egypt, the most populous Arab state with 104 million people and the key frontline state, has for decades played a criminal role as a direct accomplice in Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians and its de facto border guard.

Since signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Cairo has extended its ties with Tel Aviv, importing natural gas from Israel for refining and re-export, coordinating security over their shared border and the Gaza Strip, maintaining Israel’s blockade on Gaza, and strictly limiting the movement of people and goods across its borders after Hamas took control in 2007. Egypt stood by when Israel launched murderous assaults on the besieged enclave in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, the 2018-29 Great March of Return and 2021.

When the Gaza offensive started in October, Israel’s “wartime proposal” to push Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai desert was met with a furious response from Cairo. However, this was not out of any concern for the Palestinians but because of what El-Sisi called “Gaza’s existential threat to Egypt’s national security.” If a million Gazans crossed the border, he warned, this would lead to a resurgence of Islamist “militancy” in Sinai.

When El-Sisi refers to a resurgence of Islamist militancy, he means a renewal of the mass popular opposition known as the 25 January Revolution, which in 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring”, ended Mubarak’s personal rule. On July 3, 2013, the junta was able to resume power in a military coup thanks to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeois liberal opposition and their pseudo-left appendages in the Revolutionary Socialists, who provided leading personnel for the anti-Islamist Tamarod movement through which the military and its billionaire backers prepared the political ground for the coup. El-Sisi has brutally crushed all dissent ever since and the last thing he wants is millions of displaced and angry Palestinians to act as the focus for broader political opposition to his regime, to US imperialism and all its allies in the region.

The army has already fortified the concrete border wall with Gaza, installing barbed wire to prevent the Palestinians from crossing into the Sinai and deploying troops and 40 tanks along the border.

El-Sisi, speaking at a press conference on October 18 with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Cairo, argued that Israel could move Gaza’s Palestinians to Israel’s Negev desert instead of Sinai “until Israel is capable of defeating Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Afterwards, Palestinians could return to their homeland.”

Reports are circulating, citing the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, that Egypt is constructing an eight-square-mile walled enclosure in northern Sinai to host Palestinians forcibly expelled from Gaza, though this is described as a “contingency plan” in the event Palestinians succeed in breaching the reinforced border.

But wherever the de facto concentration camps being discussed are eventually established, Egypt and the other Arab regimes involved are giving a greenlight for mass murder in Rafah. On Sunday, with breathtaking cynicism Egyptian officials, responding to these latest proposals for tent cities, told Israel that they would not object to a military operation in Rafah as long as it is conducted without harming Palestinian civilians. Army Radio also said that Egypt had emphatically denied reports it might pullout of its 1979 Camp David treaty if Israel attacked Rafah.

All the oil-rich despots are working openly with Israel to enable it to pursue its genocidal war, even deepening their ties to ensure Israel can continue the war without hindrance. They cover their treachery with crocodile tears over the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, support for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and appeals for an urgent meeting of the toothless UN Security Council that is subject to Washington’s veto “to prevent Israel from causing an imminent humanitarian disaster for which everyone who supports the aggression is responsible.”

Jordan: Repressing Palestinian protests

Jordan has played the most open role in repressing popular opposition to Israel. It shares a long border with Israel and is home to over 2.2 million registered Palestinian refugees driven there by wars between 1947 and 1967, and their descendants. Around half of its 11 million population are of Palestinian descent, of whom around two thirds have been granted citizenship, but they face discrimination while nearly 400,000 still live in 10 refugee camps. Jordan has maintained a “cold peace” with Israel following a US Clinton administration-brokered normalization treaty in 1994.

The Jordanian government has banned protests along its border with the West Bank and clamped down on protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), it has “arrested or harassed” over 1,000 pro-Palestine protesters who have called for the Jordanian government to take action against Israel. Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said “Jordanian authorities are trampling the right to free expression and assembly to tamp down Gaza-related activism.”

Last week, the authorities arrested activist, Khaled al-Natour, after he shared posts calling for the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, as part of the government’s heightened crackdown on pro-Palestine activists, under a controversial new cybercrime law. According to Amnesty International, the vaguely worded law, passed in August, gives the government huge latitude to crack down on free speech and has been used to arrest and charge at least six political activists for their “social media posts expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments or criticizing the authorities’ policies towards Israel and advocating for public strikes and protests.”

Arab regimes keeping Israel’s economy running

Jordan, along with several other Arab states, is also playing a central role in keeping Israel’s economy functioning during the war.

According to Israel’s television Channel 13, the United Arab Emirates-based PureTrans FZCO and Israel-based Trucknet, which provides logistics technology for the Arab shipping companies, are transporting vital goods, including food, plastics, chemicals and electronic devices and components, between Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port and Haifa port, via roads passing through Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The route was established prior to the Gaza offensive. In June, Miri Regev, Israel’s Minister of Transportation and Road Safety, announced plans to develop the route, stating on X/Twitter that “the overland transportation of the goods will shorten the time by 12 days and greatly reduce the existing waiting time due to the wire problem. We will do it and we will succeed.” In September, Trucknet signed a shipping agreement with the UAE and Bahrain.

The plans also include a railway line, yet to be agreed, linking the UAE and Israel with a high-speed train service between Israel’s northern city of Beit She’an and southern port of Eilat on the Red Sea.

The route has assumed greater strategic significance since October and especially because of Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea, helping Israel circumvent the shipping blockade and cutting the 14-day sea route around the Cape to four days.

Acutely conscious of the mass opposition within its already restive population to Israel’s genocidal war, Jordan denied that goods were being transported to Israel via its territory. But television reports showing trucks from the UAE crossing Jordanian territory to reach Israel exposed this lie, sparking anger and demonstrations against Jordan’s ‘shameful land bridge’ to Israel.

The Dubai-Haifa “land corridor” was in fact first mooted in 2017 by Israel’s transport minister Yisrael Katz and highlighted at the signing in 2020 of the Abraham Accords with the UAE and Bahrain–and later with Sudan and Morrocco–that ended the participants’ long-standing economic boycott of Israel. It made apparent Israel’s economic ties with the Gulf states that had long been kept under wraps.

The Accords not only signified the ditching of their long defunct adherence to securing a “two-state solution,” even as Netanyahu threatened to annex one third of the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. It crucially paved the way for trade and investment deals with Tel Aviv, particularly in arms, technology and cyberware, and Israel’s broader economic integration into the region begun clandestinely after the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Saudi Arabia and the planned war against Iran

Bahrain could only sign up to the Accords with the tacit consent of its paymaster in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is now directly involved in the Dubai-Haifa corridor as part of its efforts to extract as many concessions as possible from Washington, including a defence agreement, commitment of “security” support, arms and fighter jets and help with a civilian nuclear program, even as it expanded its economic and political links with China to strengthen its bargaining position.

The land corridor is a key concern for the US and European imperialist powers. It is aimed at positioning the Israeli port of Haifa as a major gateway to Europe, altering the political and economic map of the region by bypassing the Red Sea and furthering Israel’s integration into the Gulf states’ economies.

Haifa would be the linchpin of the India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a major transport infrastructure project aimed at integrating India, the Gulf and Europe while avoiding Iran, which would bring India closer to US imperialism and counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Oman’s Salalah Port, which has extensive ties with India, could also become part of the new network.

The project, which excludes Turkey, the largest non-oil economy in the Middle East, has aroused Ankara’s wrath, with government officials saying that the most suitable route for east-west trade passes through Turkey not Greece. It also undermines Egypt’s Suez Canal that is already suffering financial losses from the diversion of shipping round the Cape, intensifying its economic and social crisis.

The Arab regimes now account for one quarter of Israel’s $12.5 billion defence exports. Leaders from the UAE have also reiterated their commitment to the Abraham Accords, with UAE presidential foreign affairs adviser Anwar Gargash telling a conference in Dubai last month, “The UAE has taken a strategic decision, and strategic decisions are long-term.”

The bilateral flow of goods has exploded, expanding from $11.2 million in 2019 to $2 billion, excluding software, from January to August 2023, according to Israel’s UAE ambassador. The UAE-Israel partnership deal that came into force last year lowered tariffs with the aim of increasing bilateral trade to $10bn within five years. While far less than Israel’s trade with the European Union and Turkey, this is nevertheless far more than Israel’s trade with Egypt and Jordan.

As Israeli CEOs told the Financial Times, amid the Gaza genocide it has been “business as usual,” with new investment plans going ahead and the UAE’s airline continuing its flights to Tel Aviv even as others cancel theirs.

While Saudi Arabia was never a “frontline state” in the Arab Israeli conflict, in October 1973 it led the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) ban on the export of oil to those countries that had supported Israel during the October 1973 Arab Israeli War. The war began after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories lost in the 1967 war. Only Iraq and Libya did not take part in the oil embargo that was lifted in March 1974, by which time the price of oil had risen nearly threefold, massively increasing the oil states’ wealth and reactionary political influence in the region.

50 years later, there has been no mention of a similar embargo in defence of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, indicating the monarchies’ backing for Israel’s war, paid for and planned by the Biden administration, to assert US hegemony over the resource-rich region and suppress all opposition to Washington and its regional allies and to their own regime.

Israel’s war on Gaza has done nothing to derail Washington’s long-running efforts to broker a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. A potential Saudi-Israel deal is a crucial part of its bid to settle the Gaza conflict with Riyadh indicating its willingness to proceed with discussions. For their part, the US and UK have consolidated the reversal of their previous opposition to Riyadh’s war to unseat the Houthis in Yemen, launching hundreds of aerial strikes on the Houthis in response to their attacks on shipping linked to Israel aimed at putting pressure on Israel to end its war and blockade of Gaza.

The Arab regimes, whose populations hold them in contempt, have made a pact with the devil: support for Israel—and by implication US imperialism—in return for Washington’s commitment to back their “security” in the event of a new “Arab Spring” or mass movement to unseat them, and to wage war against Iran, which has backed opposition forces to their rule, as part of its preparations for war on China.

Julian Assange’s Day in Court

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Julian Assange’s lawyers — in a final bid on Tuesday to stop his extradition — fought valiantly to poke holes in the case of the prosecution to obtain an appeal.

And Our Flags Are Still There – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

By the afternoon the video link, which would have allowed Julian Assange to follow his final U.K. appeal to prevent his extradition, had been turned off. Julian, his attorneys said, was too ill to attend, too ill even to follow the court proceedings on a link, although it was possible he was no longer interested in sitting through another judicial lynching. The rectangular screen, tucked under the black wrought iron bars that enclosed the upper left hand corner balcony of the courtroom where Julian would have been caged as a defendant, was perhaps a metaphor for the emptiness of this long and convoluted judicial pantomime. 

The arcane procedural rules — the lawyers in their curled blonde wigs and robes, the spectral figure of the two judges looking down on the court from their raised dais in their gray wigs and forked white collars, the burnished walnut paneled walls, the rows of lancet windows, the shelves on either side filled with law books in brown, green, red, crimson, blue and beige leather bindings, the defense lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald KC and Mark Summers KC, addressing the two judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Johnson, as “your lady” and “my lord” — were all dusty Victorian props employed in a modern Anglo-American show trial. It was a harbinger of a decrepit justice system that, subservient to state and corporate power, is designed to strip us of our rights by judicial fiat.

The physical and psychological disintegration of Julian, seven years trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly five years held on remand in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh, was always the point, what Nils Melzer the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture calls his “slow-motion execution.”  Political leaders, and their echo chambers in the media, fall all over themselves to denounce the treatment of Alexei Navalny but say little when we do the same to Julian. The legal farce grinds forward like the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. It will probably grind on for a few more months — one can’t expect the Biden administration to add the extradition of Julian to all its other political woes. It may take months to issue a ruling, or grant one or two appeal requests, as Julian continues to waste away in HM Prison Belmarsh. 

Julian’s nearly 15-year legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. He took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, before being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in 2019 who were permitted by the Ecuadorian embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.

Julian did not commit a crime. He is not a spy. He did not purloin classified documents. He did what we all do, although he did it in a far more important way. He published voluminous material, leaked to him by Chelsea Manning, which exposed U.S. war crimes, lies, corruption, torture and assassinations. He ripped back the veil to expose the murderous machinery of the U.S. empire.

The two-day hearing is Julian’s last chance to appeal the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel. On Wednesday the prosecution will make its arguments. If he is denied an appeal he can request the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But the British court may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January 2021, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, refused to authorize the extradition request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk” Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would endure in the U.S. prison system. At the same time, she accepted all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith. She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised Julian would be treated well. The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to Special Administrative Measure. They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado.

The defense must convince the two judges that the District Judge made serious legal errors to see an appeal granted.  

They argued that espionage is, as a matter of law, a political offense and that the extradition treaty with the U.S. prohibits extradition for political offenses. They focused on the extensive UK law, common law and international law that defines espionage as a “pure political offense” because it is directed against a state apparatus. For this reason, those charged with espionage should be protected from extradition. The lawyers spent a long time adjudicating the case of Chelsea Manning to justify her leak of documents that exposed war crimes as in the public interest, then arguing that if she was justified in leaking the documents Julian was justified in publishing them.

As the day wore on it became evident that the two judges were not well versed in the case, constantly asking for citations and expressing surprise that senior officials in the U.S., such as Mike Pompeo when he was head of the CIA, said Julian would not be protected by the First Amendment in an American court because he was not a citizen. Julian’s lawyers brought up past espionage cases, such as that of MI5 agent David Shayler, prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1989 for passing secret documents to The Mail on Sunday in 1997 — which included the names of agents. He also disclosed that MI5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence service) kept files on prominent politicians, including Labour ministers, and that MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence service) was involved in a plot to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Momar Gaddafi. The British extradition request was rejected by the French Cour d’Appel because it was a “political offense.”  

All 18 counts filed against Julian allege that his purpose was “that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States and the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The hearing was, after those in 2020 that focused on Julian’s mental and psychological health, refreshing in that it discussed the crimes committed by the U.S. and the importance of making them public. The two judges rarely interrupted, unlike other court proceedings for Julian I have attended where the judge often condescendingly cut short the defense. This may be a reflection of the broad public support, including by major media organizations, which have belatedly rallied behind Julian. Hundreds of people thronged the entrance to The Royal Courts of Justice, an expansive Victorian Gothic stone building adorned with statues of Jesus, Moses, Solomon and Alfred the Great, the celebrated pillars of the English legal tradition, to call for Julian’s freedom.

The afternoon session was different. On about a half dozen occasions the judges halted the defense to ask about how the leaks, because they were not thoroughly redacted, had endangered lives, although the U.S. has never been able to provide evidence of anyone whose life was lost as a result of the leaks. This canard has long been the cross on which U.S. officials have sought to crucify Julian. The two judges — one wonders if they had been given instructions during the lunch break — hurled these accusations at the defense lawyers until we adjourned.

“These indiscriminate disclosures were condemned by The Guardian and The New York Times,” Judge Sharp admonished the defense team. “They could have been done differently.”

This reference was especially egregious since the unredacted documents were first made public not by WikiLeaks or Julian but by the website Cryptome after reporters from The Guardian printed the password to the unredacted documents in their book.

The U.S. is officially seeking Julian’s extradition, where he potentially faces up to 175 years in prison, for the 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and US diplomatic cables. But the U.S. did not request his extradition until the release in March 2017 of the files known as Vault 7 which detailed how the CIA could hack Apple and Android smartphones and turn internet-connected televisions — even when they were off — into listening devices. Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee, was found guilty last year of four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents after handing over classified materials to WikiLeaks. He was given a forty-year sentence in February.

After the release of Vault 7 then CIA Director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” The Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, said that Julian’s arrest was a priority. By August the U.S. Senate had passed a 78-page intelligence finance bill which included a sentence declaring that “it is the sense of Congress that Wikileaks and the senior leadership of Wikileaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.” In May 2019 the Trump administration accused Julian of violating the Espionage Act and asked the UK to extradite him to stand trial in the U.S. Trump has called the allegations against Julian treason and called for “the death penalty or something.” Other politicians, including former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, have also called for Julian to be executed.

If Julian is extradited and additionally charged for the release of the Vault 7 documents, Fitzgerald told the court, “it could result in additional charges that merit the death penalty for aiding and abetting the enemy.” The U.S., he said, especially if Trump is elected again to the presidency, could easily “reformulate these charges into a capital offense.”

Summers brought up President Donald Trump’s request for “detailed options” of how to assassinate Julian when he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy. “Sketches were even drawn up,” he said, adding that the plot fell apart when the UK authorities backed down, especially over a potential shootout, in the streets of London”.

“The evidence showed that the US was prepared to go to any lengths, including misusing its own criminal justice system, to sustain impunity for US officials in respect of the torture/war crimes committed in its infamous ‘war on terror’, and to suppress those actors and courts willing and prepared to try to bring those crimes to account,” he said.

 The lawyers were right. The CIA is the driving force behind the extradition. The leak was highly embarrassing and to the CIA highly damaging. The CIA intends to make Julian pay. Schulte, who leaked Vault 7, was given a forty year sentence. Julian, if extradited, will be next. 

Let Them Eat Dirt

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The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.

Let Them Eat Dirt – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed. 

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza. 

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.” 

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective. 

The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks. 

More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.

More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.

“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”

The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March. 

Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.

I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as in Gaza, did little to intervene. 

The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it. 

Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.

I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families. 

In the abandoned town of Mayen Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattered strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead. 

Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count.  They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan. 

There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.

Southern countries no longer trust the West

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By Veniamin Popov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza against Palestinians under US patronage has had an enormous impact on developing countries. Four months of Israeli military action against the Palestinians had been a watershed in the attitude of the Global South towards the West: the number of civilians killed and wounded, most of them women and children, was approaching 100,000; in an enclave of nearly 2.5 million people, one third of the houses had been completely destroyed. This has not just shown the hypocrisy of the Western Powers with their constant policy of double standards. It has convinced many that the West cannot be at the mercy of the West: it will stop at nothing to impose solutions that are favourable to it.

Many in the Middle East and the Global South were struck both by the brutality of Israel’s military campaign and the unwavering support for it by Western governments. “For them this is as much a war”, wrote the Al Ahram newspaper on 30.01.2024, “as US President Joe Biden’s war as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s, and the continued indifference to the scale of destruction has once again confirmed how cheap Arab life seems to Western leaders”.

As Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, argues in his book What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Collapse of Democracy in the Middle East, the United States and other Western countries, principally Britain, have for nearly a century pursued an interventionist, militaristic and anti-democratic foreign policy that has largely ignored the interests of the Middle East. After the brutal Hamas attack on 7 October, which revealed, in the words of Egypt’s Al Ahram, the folly of Biden and Netanyahu’s approach, there was no restraint or attempt to think through the consequences of the current war. Instead, Biden and his European allies supported Israel’s fatal attack on the Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that the civilian death toll is rising at an unprecedented rate, the humanitarian crisis is becoming more acute by the day, and governments around the world have called for a ceasefire, Biden has shown no willingness to intervene to prevent bloodshed.

It is no coincidence that the media of many nations published articles about Frantz Fanon, an anti-colonial activist who grew up in a black middle-class family in French colonial Martinique: more than any other writer of the time, he captured the rage generated by colonial humiliation in the hearts of colonised people, and was a remarkably astute analyst of contemporary ills – the ongoing psychological traumas of racism and oppression, the enduring power of white nationalism, and the scourge of authoritarian predatory post-colonial regimes. In Fanon’s view, the world then was split in two, which is also absolutely true of today.

The West’s current strategy has failed colossally, and the American-led Anglo-Saxon empire is also failing: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the Turkish Daily Sabah newspaper reported in early February, have exposed the limits of Western power and its highly duplicitous approach to international law and the laws of war. The decision by some Western states to cut off funding to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA “is a brazen and shameless move to starve the Palestinians and force Hamas to capitulate”.

By supporting Israel and allowing it to kill tens of thousands of civilians, Western countries are putting themselves on the opposite edge of the values and principles of multilateralism and respect for human rights, “they are going against the very foundations on which the UN was built”, the Al Jazeera website wrote on 16.01.24. Another article on the same site noted that Gaza will be the grave of the Western-led world order: by supporting Israel’s atrocities, the West has undermined what is left of its authority and brought the rules-based world order to the point of no return: the authority of the West has been irrevocably undermined.

The United States military strikes on Syria, Iraq and Yemen have caused an explosion of anti-American sentiment throughout the Arab world, once again demonstrating the aggressive nature of US policy in the Middle East and Washington’s complete disregard for the norms of international law.

According to a poll conducted in 16 Arab states on 10.01.24 – 89% of respondents opposed recognising Israel, and 77% considered the US and Israel the biggest security threat to the region.

The Saudi newspaper Arab News emphasised in mid-January this year that many Western leaders are increasingly moving away from their people. In early February, the New York Times reported that more than 800 US and EU civil servants published a protest against their governments’ support for Israel; last November, more than 500 employees of 40 US government agencies sent a letter to President Biden criticising his policies on the Gaza war.

Turkish newspapers have consistently published stories that the Global North should abandon old approaches and rethink its international policies.

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, noted on 29.01.24 that the continuation of the Gaza massacre is costing the countries of the region and the world economy dearly, it is also hitting America’s interests and image.

Recent events on the world stage are increasingly convincing the people of developing countries that their interests are at odds with those of the West, and in some issues are diametrically opposed.

2024 Is the New 1984: Big Brother and the Rise of the Security Industrial Complex

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell, 1984

2024 is the new 1984.

Forty years past the time that George Orwell envisioned the stomping boot of Big Brother, the police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state.

Fueled by a melding of government and corporate power—the rise of the security industrial complex—this watershed moment sounds a death knell for our privacy rights.

An unofficial fourth branch of government, the Surveillance State came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military.

It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

This is the new face of tyranny in America: all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.

Tread cautiously.

Empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, the Surveillance State is making the fictional world of 1984, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, our looming reality.

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Indeed, in our present age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives.

Everything is increasingly public.

What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.

This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

In this way, 1984, which depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism, has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices. 

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.

As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy enshrined in the  Fourth Amendment and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.

The police state has become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector.

Over the past 50-plus years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.

The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.

The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.

The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.

Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.

Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”

In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.

The fourth revolutionary shift may well be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.

While the guarantee of safety afforded by these surveillance nerve centers remains dubious, at best, there is no disguising their contribution in effecting a sea change towards outright authoritarianism.

For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.

Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity.

As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

After all, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Surveillance State never sleeps.

Navigating The Space Between Worlds

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Mastering the art of being in the world, even when we know it’s filled with heavy challenges and chaos.

By Joe Martino

Source: The Pulse

Over the last few decades, many have written about our time as a space where humanity is between worlds. On one hand, we have our current way of life which is incredibly demanding on our minds and bodies, is rather toxic, and filled with conflict and destruction. On the other hand is a vision for a world that’s slower, more connected, more natural, and more loving.

As we navigate what appears to be the dying stages of the old paradigm, the intensity of what it is seems to increase. The qualities of the old system become louder, acting as an evolutionary pressure to push things along.

Many become inspired to explore ways to bring the ‘new world’ to the here and now via their actions.

How do I live without money?
How do I exit the toxicity of our current system?
How do I not participate anymore?

If we aren’t careful, these questions can create a framing of our current world that can make it very hard to live within.

If we deeply judge the need to work, to make money, to pay taxes etc, all of it can become a heavy thing to carry. We end up waking up every day dreading going to work, and having endless conversations, thoughts and emotions about how the bad guys are ruining life for us and we’re the victims in it all.

While there may be truth to some of the observations about our society, the framing of it in our minds is disempowering many of us, and it’s making our current moment dreadful. Further, it holds us back from living and being able to solve the problem.

So how do we work with this? How do we live in the space between worlds?

What Feels Natural To Us?

Indeed, our current societal design is not supportive of human beings thriving. In that sense, it has been poorly designed. We have such an easy time as a species doing this because our higher-order thinking allows us to override what is good for our biology. Simply put: it’s easy to ignore our needs using our thinking, especially when we become so identified with life cognitively.

I have 7 alpacas. The moment they need to poop, they just do it, no thinking, no “I’ll just finish this paragraph,” they just do it. They listen to their biology. Humans on the other hand don’t always listen. In some cases we don’t because we have social structures, social norms, and brains to hold this all together. But we also don’t because we’ve learned to ignore our body, feelings, and emotions in many ways.

While our higher-order thinking is beautiful in one sense, how do we know when it begins to work against us?

I often use an example with friends and clients of a bear. The bear (a mammal like us) was likely raised by an attached parent. It learned how to ‘bear’ and how to be in its environment from that parent in its natural environment. If that bear’s ecosystem was cut down or destroyed by humans, it wouldn’t stay for too long. It would know that concrete, a lack of forest, and a lack of fresh water aren’t good for it, and it would leave to find a suitable home. The bear is simply following its connection to its biology.

We as humans know we are doing this to animals and call it ‘displacing nature/animals.’ Interestingly, we tend to see ourselves ‘outside’ of nature, conveniently ignoring how we’re ‘displacing’ ourselves.

As mentioned, humans are resilient in that we can survive in different environments. We find ways to adjust, cope, and problem solve within environments that are not natural to us. Here I’m not just talking about physical environments but also emotional ones. We find ways to survive in abusive situations for example. We know we should leave, but sometimes we feel we can’t or don’t have the capacity to.

Further, there are difficult elements to our environments like not having access to clean food, clean water, and shelter without having to work very hard to get them.

Because of our amazing thinking brains, humans can do and create incredible things, but we can also become so cognitively and mentally identified that we override our basic biology so much so that we build systems that aren’t attuned to our own well-being.

Thus, humans are currently surviving, but we are in no way thriving. And we did this to ourselves via a disconnection from ourselves.

To be clear, it’s not that we shouldn’t have roads, technology, and societal systems, it’s that they should be designed with human and natural thrivability in mind. Instead, our world is designed with economic thrivability and elite power structures in mind. All at the expense of human wellness.

The tricky part is, that the more people see and experience this truth, the more we can become angered and upset by it. This is fair. A boundary feels crossed because we living now aren’t necessarily the ones who built it or are choosing it. “Why am I subjected to a system I don’t like nor support, yet feel like I can’t escape it?”

As I stated in my essay If No One Wants This, Why Are We Doing It? our way of life doesn’t feel natural to us deep down and it’s overwhelming the challenge is we can’t change it overnight. So what do we do to live within it without driving ourselves mad?

Exploring The Art of Existing Between Worlds

Over the last 15 years exploring alternative thinking and spiritual spaces, I have discovered that it’s common for people to want to fully “exit” the system. They don’t want to integrate, use money, or do anything within the system as they feel it’s “toxic.”

As mentioned, these feelings are somewhat valid, but how we choose to navigate them is everything. Here are a few key observations.

1. Having unprocessed anger, resentment, victimhood and judgment for the system is a recipe for disaster.

If we go to work each day, pay taxes, or drive on highways with the mindset and emotional drive that we are victims and stuck, we will certainly make our lives feel more challenging. Our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual framing at that point is that of contraction and stuckness. And it’s often built on a nervous system foundation of survival.

Everything will feel much more difficult in this state. Now, this doesn’t mean we can’t observe the state of the world, understand it, and explore how to change it, all of that can be done without getting stuck in mental and emotional traps. But we have to be careful about the general state of mind and being we are taking into our daily lives. Without being aware of this, we give all of our power away to the system and allow it to dictate how we feel.

I’ve watched people panic and freak out about not eating organic apples, yet their mindset and relationship with themselves and the world is creating more toxicity in themselves than a non-organic apple.

When this mindset goes unchecked, our locus of control for our own well-being is outside of us, not inside. (Key note, I’m not suggesting that the system doesn’t have toxic effects on us, I’m saying that there is a space where we can exist within the system with greater wellness.)

Can we begin to see work, life, and what we currently have going as an opportunity? Can we change the lens through which we see it so it doesn’t add to greater dis-ease? Can we support ourselves, our nervous system, and our emotional well-being through practice that helps us build capacity and resilience?

2. Trying to exit completely is incredibly hard, and most end up just as unhappy.

I have found a lot of people trying everything in their power to avoid working and making money. Here I’m not referring to people who are not well or injured and can’t work, I’m talking about folks who can yet have such a degree of judgment toward the system that they avoid being within it.

Often this path leaves people stuck, uninspired, unable to experience much of the world, and unable to even afford fun projects at home. Life begins to become small, and these people rarely seem truly happy.

That said, intentional communities are an interesting path for some. Although they work and exist within the system in more ways than people think. Sure, a few places are fully off grid, but for the most part money, utilities, land purchases, property tax etc, are all part of the mix.

If you don’t have a lot of money, this path is very tough. People can of course move to countries where things are very cheap and start over, but even that is tough for most people as it’s still expensive and work still needs to be found to live well into the future.

1. Exploring capacity and resilience building to exist in our current world and help solve problems within it seems a fruitful path. This includes doing small things within the system to make life more natural.

To me, this is a path that is accessible to most people and provides a meaningful balance of making a difference and enjoying life. I may also be biased toward this as this is the path I’ve chosen and have taught throughout my work since 2009.

For example, I chose to start a company and embrace the world as it was in 2009. I built my business on a foundation of creating an amazing work environment for employees to work, rest, grow, and contribute to a ‘collective evolution.’ Over time, I was able to give back by hiring 14 people to come into this environment of serving something greater than our personal ambitions, yet those were taken care of too.

We did some amazing projects around the world with excess funds, and we helped establish an internet culture of wellness, consciousness and conscious media. If I had kept the system at a distance, those benefits would not have been shared.

Humans have lived for such a long time in unnatural ways, disconnected from ourselves, and not processing our emotions and traumas, our nervous systems hold that history. It is further being re-inforced by the reality that yes, there is toxicity still in our world. It is badly designed.

But still, regulation and capacity at a deep cellular level need to be restored for most of us. We need to clear out the messy stuff. Otherwise, we will take our pains into any revolutionary systems that pops up outside the system anyway. We see this a lot with intentional communities that collapse.

This means focusing on deeply restoring physiological safety, wellbeing, emotional fluidity and regulation is foundational to living well, and it can be done even in the existing system. Even though our system is tough, this path gives us much more energy, resilience and capacity to exist within the system and make as big a difference as possible while enjoying life.

This path is work. It acknowledged that it isn’t easy to feel great in our world due to the poor design, but that it’s still within our capacity if we focus on it.

This doesn’t mean we ignore the need to change or adjust our system. But this path gives us the greatest ability to do so as we will have built the capacity and deep empowerment to actually do it, vs. being feeling stuck, tired and victimized resisting the system so heavily.

Existing in a space between worlds means building individual and collective wellbeing, and creating change along the way. The more resilient we are, the more we can make money and use it as a tool to find ways to make our lives better, less reliant on the system, and healthier.

In that space of wellness, we can have meaningful conversations and learn to hold visions of a future world that isn’t built on hating and resenting the old. If I’m honest, almost all of the successful changes and projects I’ve seen out there have come from this space of being.

In summary, taking stock of whether our observations of the world have become deep disempowering judgements is a worthwhile reflection. Being ‘awake to corruption’ doesn’t have to come with lifelong resentment toward the system, where we comment online about ‘the bad guys’ ruining things for everyone. Or that somehow Biden, Trump, Trudeau etc. are the root of the problems. I hate to say it but, this gets us nowhere.

Questioning whether we are truly living our lives in a way that promotes emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being and expansiveness is important. Without this, our foundation is weak.

The path forward I’m suggesting is one of building enough strength, well-being, and energy to live with wellness in our current system, so we have energy left over to see clearly and act upon changing what is not natural to us. Good sensemaking of our current events goes alongside this, but as you’ll note from my previous work, good sensemaking is built on a healthy nervous system.