The NSF has awarded the following nine grants since September 1:
A $330,000 grant to a postdoctoral fellowship that will “develop educational materials to help identify misinformation in media.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $1.5 million grant to Arizona State University as part of a biological sciences program. The grant will help build “new risk management strategies” and its description claims that the “rapid dissemination of information on the internet is contributing to the spread of misinformation about hazards, risks, and how to manage them.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $529,609 grant to Florida International University to conduct a study on “detection and containment of influence campaigns” that “distribute and amplify misinformation and hate speech with significant societal impact.” The associated program is due to start on October 1, 2023.
Two grants totaling $600,000 to the University of Rochester and Trustees of Indiana University for a collaborative research program that aims to increase the efficiency of an AI technique that can be applied to various areas, including “identifying misinformation on social media.” The associated programs are due to start on October 1, 2023.
The State Department has awarded the following five grants since September 1:
A $14,500 grant to Paraguay’s American Cultural Center that will be used to implement workshops that “seek to combat misinformation and promote responsible digital citizenship.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $50,000 grant to New York University to complete the implementation of a speaker series that supports “countering misinformation.” The associated program is due to start on October 1, 2023.
A $50,000 grant to the non-profit Digital Rights Nepal “to create a sustainable network of youth to promote digital rights, safer internet use and a collective resilience towards misinformation and disinformation.” The associated program is due to start on October 2, 2023.
These awards were granted as the Biden admin faces a major lawsuit for pressuring Big Tech to censor content that it deems to be misinformation.
While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted.
On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):
This will be my last official communication to you. …
This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …
We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …
Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.
The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:
Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.
Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).
Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3]Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]
as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]
If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and with the possibility of US troops entering the war will face Hamas in Northern Gaza and that will quickly turn into a quagmire. The main objective for Hamas was to lure Israeli forces into Gaza and fight their war, on their terms. It is certain that Hamas who is considered a terrorist organization by the West will use ‘Hit and Run’ tactics that has defeated major colonial empires throughout history. Hit and run basically means that Hamas will launch surprise attacks, then they will quickly pull-back before the IDF can respond. This will continue throughout the war, so it is guaranteed that the number of dead Israeli troops will rise.
The War in Vietnam is an example of how successful Hit and Run tactics were when a communist-led nationalist movement mobilized against France, a colonial empire which was defeated and eventually forced out of the country. Then the US government decided to get involved under President Lyndon B. Johnson who feared that the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong, an armed communist movement allied with the NVA in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos formally known as the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam would soon make its way to the south and turn it into a communist stronghold.
Washington was concerned about how Vietnam could create a domino effect of communist states in Southeast Asia, so they sent military “advisors” to assist the South Vietnamese army, and by early 1963, they had sent 12,000 US troops. Two years later, 600,000 US troops were stationed in Vietnam in preparation to fight the NVA and the Viet Cong, but one of the major problems for US troops was that they were trained for a conventional war as they were obviously ill prepared to face the resistance in Vietnam who had a well-trained fighting force who used hit and run tactics, placed booby traps laced with bombs and conducted numerous ambushes that shook unsuspecting US troops throughout the war.
For several years after, US troop deaths increased while they continued to bomb targets in North Vietnam. The US had also bombed Cambodia and then Laos from March 18th, 1969, to May 26, 1970, in what was known as Operation Menu in hopes of striking the NVA and the Viet Cong believed to be in those countries to rest from battle fatigue, or to resupply and train their troops.
Many civilians were killed in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam, close to a million people died with the majority being military personal. By 1973, US troops began withdrawing from Southeast Asia with more than 58,000 dead and more than 300,000 injured including those who suffered from the psychological impact from the war and later turned to drugs and alcohol, many of them even committed suicide.
Hamas is the New ‘Viet Cong’?
So, who and what is Hamas exactly? Was Hamas an Israeli creation to rival the despised Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)? Or maybe it was to create a civil war without any Israeli fighting in it? At the time, the Israelis probably saw it as a divide and conquer strategy to seize the remaining territories while Hamas and the PLO kill each other, at the time, I would guess that it seemed like the perfect idea for Zionist hardliners.
In 2009, US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) gave a speech on the House floor and said that Israel had essentially created Hamas:
What’s happening in the Middle East, in particular with Gaza right now, we have some moral responsibility for both sides in a way because we provide help and funding for both Arab nations and Israel. We definitely have a moral responsibility, especially now today the weapons being used to kill so many Palestinians are American weapons and American funds essentially are being used for this, but there’s a political liability, which I think is something we fail to look at because too often there’s so much blowback from our intervention in areas that we shouldn’t be involved in.
You know Hamas, if you look at the history, you’ll find out that Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat, you say, well, yeah, it was better then and served its purpose, but we didn’t want Hamas to do this. So, then we, as Americans, say, well, we have such a good system; we’re going to impose this on the world. We’re going to invade Iraq and teach people how to be democrats. We want free elections. So, we encouraged the Palestinians to have a free election. They do, and they elect Hamas, So, we first, indirectly, and directly through Israel, helped establish Hamas. Then we have an election where Hamas becomes dominant, so we have to kill them. It just doesn’t make sense.
During the 80s, we were allied with Osama bin Laden, and we were contending with the Soviets. It was at that time our CIA thought it was good if we radicalize the Muslim world. So, we finance the Madrassas schools to radicalize the Muslims in order to compete with the Soviets. There is too much blowback.
There are a lot of reasons why we should oppose this resolution. It’s not in the interest of the United States, it is not in the interest of Israel either
Hamas has evolved in some ways, to some people, they are the resistance against Israeli occupation, especially for the Palestinian children who personally experienced the Gaza war of 2008. Young boys and girls at that time grew up without their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters who were either killed, imprisoned without due process, others were maimed and permanently injured by IDF forces. The massive death toll and destruction was a shock to these children, many were and are still traumatized, then they became adults with deep rooted hatred towards the Israeli and US governments.
Over the years, nothing has changed, the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank fear for their lives as they face constant Israeli airstrikes and sniper fire in the largest outdoor prison on the planet and the list goes on, and people in the West wonder why some Palestinians have joined Hamas.
For more than 75 years of Israeli occupation, the Palestinians whether Muslim or Christian have been physically displaced and turned into refugees, many were murdered, jailed, tortured, harassed, spit-on, you name it, they had it. They don’t care anymore, when people have nothing left to lose, they risk everything. Palestinians prefer fighting for their freedoms rather than to live as slaves and who can blame them? At any moment, they can get killed by an Israeli airstrike or bullet, they may even get stopped on the street by Israeli forces and get arrested for just being a Palestinian and possibly face torture in prison.
The Palestinians will not give up, they will fight with the support of most of the world. The majority of the Middle East supports Palestine. Israel’s power is supported by the US government, both Democrats and Republicans fully support Israel even though the US is in $33 trillion in debt, which means the US government cannot even afford peace, let alone war.
Israel will not live in peace as long as it exists, sooner or later, Israelis living in occupied lands will have to make a hard decision, some will they stay and fight the Muslim world, others will leave to another destination and try to finally live in peace.
In 2014, A US congressional candidate by the name of Allan Levene proposed a viable solution for Israel by creating a second ‘Israeli’ state in Eastern Texas. According to the Times of Israel, Mr. Levene’s idea would allow “eminent domain” by the US government only if Israel withdraws to it pre-1967 borders although with over a million illegal Israeli settlers living on occupied land, that will never happen, but with that said, it could set the stage for a ‘New Israel’ within the United States:
Congressional candidate Allan Levene is proposing to cut the Gordian Knot of Middle East peace by creating a second State of Israel on the eastern coast of Texas, which he would call New Israel. The idea, briefly, is to take (through eminent domain) roughly 8,000 square miles of sparsely populated land bordering the Gulf of Mexico and give it to Israel as a second, non-contiguous part of the State of Israel. Israel would get the land only if it agrees to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders.
Israel wins because it would gain a new, peaceful territory far from the strife of the Middle East, in a place where, as Levene suggests, “the climate is similar,” and Israel could “have access to the Gulf of Mexico for international trade.” The U.S. wins because it would no longer need to send Israel billions of dollars a year in foreign aid. Texas wins because of all the construction jobs from building an entirely new state within its borders. The Palestinians win because they get the West Bank, and because now Israel, too, gets to see just how fun it is to have a non-contiguous state. Everybody wins!
Since the Christian Zionists based in the US Bible Belt are concerned about God’s Chosen people, why not give them a nice piece of land in the USA? It will avoid World War III; the Israelis will be fully protected by the US military and its Christian Zionist population, and it can improve the economic landscape between the ‘New Israel’ and the US, so it is a major win for the Israelis and the Americans.
For Israel, hard choices will have to be made. The fact is, Israel and the US cannot win a war in the Middle East. If Israel is thinking about unleashing a nuclear bomb on Iran, it will completely backfire. Israel will never be at peace; it will eventually be destroyed.
As for the almighty US military machine, they will once again be defeated. That’s the reality because Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan, they have an advanced military and a people willing to fight to protect their land. If Israel is allowed to carry out an attack to “cut the head of the snake” in Tehran, it will be suicide mission, so peace in the Middle East will be unattainable, in fact, it will be impossible.
Israel’s Zionists in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine at large, continue to indifferently slaughter innocent civilian Palestinian men, women, children and babies as if they are nothing more than hated and despised beasts to be totally eradicated from off of the face of Israel and the Earth.
Yet the mass conscience and consciousness of the world’s humans hasn’t yet become shocked enough to drop everything they’re doing – flocking instead by the hundreds of thousands in America and around the globe to:
–Attend the latest competitive, corporately promoted sports event, while using all their creative human energies to idly argue about who is going to win or loose;
–plan their upcoming fantasy Halloween costumes for yet another anticipated bacchanalian
–Trick-or-Treat night-out-on-the-town; plan for a sumptuous, bountiful Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends, or;
–ready themselves for yet another year’s anticipated imagined fantasy arrival of Santa Claus down the chimney of their gayly-decorated cozy homes .
Meanwhile, in the United States, poor wretched sods, like Robert Card, a U.S. Army Reservist weapons instructor and fired worker at a recycling centre, decided the best action he could take for himself to address the woeful state of the world was to become a mass killer and just recycle 18 innocent Americans, and then recycle himself along with them by committing suicide.
Yet another sad, pathetic, minor punctuation mark to the real 2023 crisis in human affairs underway in Gaza, the West Bank, the whole of Palestine and the world.
While the only thing the mass total of politicians in its U.S. House of Representatives and United Nations Security Council can think to do to stop the on-going massacre in Gaza is to vote or not vote again, like they repeatedly did in their war against Russia in Ukraine, against any ceasefire or diplomatic negotiations.
Instead, they can only think to do is send thousands more assault weapons so Israel’s radical Zionist Nationalist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, can pass them out to crazed Zionist Jewish settler-colonists to use, willy-nilly, against still more innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians they hate with a passion with no one in authority willing or able to stop them.
While yet another Carrier Battle Group, filled with battle-trained Marines, is sent into the waters around Israel, ready to assist the Zionist Israeli’s in their, once and for all, utter annihilation of their “Palestinian Problem” that has plagued them ever since the Zionist Jews violent mass occupation [in 1948] of the ancient holy lands of Palestine. Isn’t that a nice solution to yet another ugly human disaster in the world?
With Israel’s clearly blatant. patently genocidal war against the Palestinian peoples arrogantly, grotesquely, unfolding before all of humanity’s eyes, the world clearly is at a critical crossroads in evolution of the homo sapiens species. Either it is fast completely reverting to its earlier very primitive, fascist, might makes right, state of previous centuries, or the human species is now entering into a very difficult birthing process of something that’s screaming to we humans to become more advanced and evolved.
So far, however, its the old male cretin thugs like Biden, Netanyahu and their ilk, and gross propaganda lies and manipulations by their clever wordsmiths, who still rule the roost, because the people still, basically, are too primitive, stupid and unaware to see beyond their own crude, dumb noses.
At any rate, two excellent examples of an always higher feminine consciousness constantly at work that seeks to combat this old male nemesis, are rightly aghast, as we all should be, at what is happening at present in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, who, like many of us, almost can’t believe the grotesqueness of all is actually happening. At Listen to the conversation of two such evolved feminists with one another.
Abby Martin since her formative days as a radical activist at the University of California, Santa Cruz is a genuine Keeper of the Truth, as the old saying goes, who unabashedly speaks truth to power, as does Rania Khalek of Dispatches From the Underclass.
Another fellow humanist who also questions the madness of what we humans are currently doing in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere in the world at large, is Michael Brenner, Professor Emeritus in International Affairs at the University of Pittsburg and a Fellow of the Center of Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/John Hopkins.
Brenner has authored what he calls the Final Scene: “America – its vassal train in tow”, Brenner contends, “is committing moral suicide in Palestine.” Brenner goes on in the Final Scene to say:
‘The political consequences will be profound, and as enduring as the complete discrediting of the country’s standing as a positive presence in world affairs. Encouragement of, and participation in the murderous Israel assault on Gazans has been accompanied by a torrent of lies and deceptions which discredit anything we shall do or say. The reference points for this harsh judgment are not the mythic image of “the city on the Hill;” the last, best hope of mankind; the indispensable nation for achieving global peace and stability: the Providential people born in a state of Original Virtue destined to lead the world down the path of Enlightenment. None of those idealistic standards. No, we are debased when measured against the prosaic standards of human decency, of responsible statecraft, of a decent respect for the opinions of humankind.”
Brenner further contends:
“Some might rightly say that America has behaved in similarly atrocious ways in the past – and that it always restored its sense of self-respect and effectiveness abroad. Decimation of the native population; the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wanton killing and destruction in Vietnam, and – more recently – the horrendous consequences of our interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The last two mentioned being highlighted by the razing of Falluja (twice), Mosul and Raqqa that can be seen as the template for what we and the Israelis are now doing in Gaza. The practical difference – as opposed to the moral one – is the unique attention focused on events there. After all, this is the Holy Land for the three Abrahamic religions, the main protagonist is the Jewish state of Israel founded in the wake of the Holocaust, the conflict’s powerful resonance with large communities of co-religionists in Western capitals. It is a Passion Play with rival scripts. Ours will not be the anointed one.
Moreover, it is occurring at a time when the tectonic plates of the political world are shifting, when the old constellations of power and of influence are being successfully challenged, when America has responded to feelings of self-doubt as the ordained global guide and overseer by compulsive, futile displays of muscle flexing. Anxiety and self-doubt masked by false bravado is the hallmark sentiment among the country’s political elites. That is a poor starting point for a reengagement with reality. Americans are too attached to their exalted self-image, too narcissistic – collectively and individually, too lacking in self-awareness, too leaderless to make that wrenching adaptation. Instead, we are about to see an epic act to prove that reality is only what the United States wills it to be: the girding of loins for war on Iran. It will end badly – very badly. Leaving a diminished, aggrieved but unrepentant America.”
The little bells are tinkling. Bow down
They are bringing the sacrament to a dying God
Meanwhile, the carnagebefalling Palestine, Palestinians & the World, grows worse with every passing minute, hour and day:
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors And the land that I cultivated And you left nothing for us Except for these rocks… If I become hungry The usurper’s flesh will be my food.
– Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish
It’s by now confirmed that Egyptian intel warned their Israeli counterparts only 3 days before Al-Aqsa Flood that something “big” was coming from Hamas. Tel Aviv, its multi-billion dollar security apparatus and the IDF, “the strongest army in the world”, chose to ignore it.
That configures two key vectors.
1) Tel Aviv get its “Pearl Harbor” pretext to implement a remixed “war on terror” plus a sort of Final Solution to the “Gaza problem” (already in effect).
2) The Hegemon abruptly changes the narrative away from the incoming, inevitable, cosmic joint humiliation of the White House and NATO in the steppes of Novorossiya – a strategic defeat that configures the previous humiliation in Afghanistan as a masked ball in Disneyland.
The total blockade of “human animals” (copyright Israeli Defense Ministry) in Gaza, in fact a civilian population of 2.3 million, has been imposed this past Monday. No food, no water, no fuel, no essential commodities.
That’s a war crime and a crime against humanity, thrashing the four basic principles of the
Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) – everything duly applauded or at best completely ignored by NATOstan and its assorted oligarch-controlled mainstream media.
Christians, Muslims, Jews and other ethnic groups lived peacefully in Palestine for centuries until the imposition of the racist Zionist Project – complete with all the Divide and Rule attributes of settler colonialism.
The Nakba is an old memory of 75 years ago. We are now way beyond apartheid – and entering total exclusion and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.
In January 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself stressed, “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.”
Now, the IDF sent no less than an order to the UN to completely evacuate all residents of northern Gaza – 1.1 million people – to southern Gaza, close to Rafah, the only border crossing with Egypt.
This forced mass deportation of civilians would be the prelude to raze all of northern Gaza to the ground, coupled with expulsion and confiscation of ancestral Palestinian land – edging closer to a Zionist Final Solution.
Welcome to Sociopaths United
Netanyahu, a sociopath with a proven track record, can only get away with serial war crimes because of total support by the White House, the “Biden” combo and the State Department – not to mention inconsequential EU vassals.
We just witnessed a U.S. Secretary of State – a low-IQ functionary out of his depth on every single issue – going to Israel to support collective punishment “as a Jew as well”.
He said his grandfather “fled pogroms in Russia” (that was in 1904). Then came the direct – Nazi – connection to “my stepfather survived Auschwitz, Dachau and Majdanek”. Impressive, that’s three concentration camps in a row. The secretary is obviously oblivious to the fact that the USSR liberated all three.
Then came the connection Russia-Nazis-Hamas. At least it’s all clear.
Internally, Netanyahu is only able to stay as Prime Minister because of especially two rabid ultra-Zionist, racist, supremacist coalition partners. He named Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister and Bezalel Smotrich as Finance Minister – both de facto in charge of proliferating settlements all across the West Bank in industrial scale.
Smotrich has been on the record saying that “there is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, in record time, are on their way to double the settler population in the cantons across the West Bank from 500,000 to one million. Palestinians – de facto non-citizens – number 3.7 million. lllegal settlements – not formally approved by Tel Aviv – are popping up all across the spectrum.
In Gaza – where poverty hovers at 60% and youth unemployment is massive – UN agencies desperately warn of an impending humanitarian catastrophe.
Over 1 million people in Gaza, mostly women and children, depend on UN food assistance. Tens of thousands of kids go to UNRWA schools (UNRWA is the agency for Palestinian refugees).
Tel Aviv is now killing them – softly. At least 11 UNRWA workers have been killed this past week (including teachers, a doctor and an engineer), at least 30 kids, plus 5 members of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.
To top it all up, there’s the Pipelineistan angle – as in stealing Gaza gas.
At least 60% of the vast gas reserves discovered in 2000 along the Gaza-Israel coastline legally belong to Palestine.
A key consequence of the Final Solution applied to Gaza translates as sovereignty over the gas fields switched to Israel – in yet another massive trampling of international law.
The Global Majority is Palestine
Amid the horrifying prospect of Israel depopulating the entire northern half of Gaza, live on TV and cheered on by hordes of NATOstan zombies, it’s not far-fetched to consider the possibility of Turkiye, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf monarchies joining together, at various levels, to create overwhelming pressure against the implementation of the Zionist Final Solution.
Virtually the whole Global South/Global Majority is with Palestine.
Turkiye, problematically, is not an Arab nation and has been too ideologically close to Hamas in the recent past. Assuming the current Netanyahu gang would engage in diplomacy, the possible best mediation team would be formed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egyptian diplomacy.
India has just stabbed itself in the head as a leader of the Global Majority: their leadership does seem to get a hard on when facing Israel.
Then there are the Big Sovereigns: the Russia-China strategic partnership.
Russia-Iran are themselves connected by a strategic partnership – including at all state of the art military levels. The Iran-Saudi rapprochement mediated and clinched by China has led, this week, to Mohammad bin Salman and Ebrahim Raisi on the phone, for the first time ever, coordinating their unwavering support to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has just visited China, received with full honors.
China’s trademark diplomatic sophistication – way beyond Al-Aqsa Flood – amounts to supporting legitimate Palestinian rights. The whole Arab world and the lands of Islam clearly feel it – while Israel and NATOstan are impervious to nuance.
With Russia we reach heavy metal territory. Earlier this week, Israel’s ambassador to Russia, Alexander Ben Zvi, was finally received, after several attempts by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov. It was Israel who practically begged for a meeting.
Bogdanov cut to the chase, bluntly: Ben Zvi was warned that the IDF plan to literally destroy Gaza, expel the indigenous population and practice the ethnic cleansing of those “human animals” was “fraught with the most devastating consequences for the humanitarian situation in the region.”
That advances a quite possible scenario – whose consequences can be equally devastating: Moscow – in collaboration with Ankara – launching a Global South-supported blockade-busting operation against Israel.
It’s no secret – apart from the modus operandi – that Putin and Erdogan have discussed a possible Turkish humanitarian naval convoy to Gaza, which would be protected from an Israeli attack by the Russian Navy out of its Tartous base in Syria and the Russian air Force out of Hmeimim. That would raise the stakes to unforeseen levels.
What’s clear already is that the Hegemon proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli “war on terror” remixed in Gaza are just parallel fronts of a single, horrifyingly evolving, global war.
NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.
The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel — the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.
“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya – as it did Iraq – as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.
There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020, 6,027 of which were civilian casualties.
In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”
“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The country’s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.”
Amnesty International’s 2022 Libya report also makes for grim reading. “Militias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,” it says. “Scores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced ‘confessions’ on camera.” Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that “EU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.”
Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire.
Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition — estimated to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons — were looted from Libya with many being trafficked to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists. This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso.
The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights.
The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes.
Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.
Hillary Clinton’s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published by WikiLeaks, also expose France’s concerns about Gaddafi’s efforts to “provide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).” Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes that the French president seeks “a greater share of Libyan oil”, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”
Sarkozy, who has been convicted on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.
These were the real “crimes” in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights.
The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues.
The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.
Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis of Samantha Power’s book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” They champion the R2P doctrine, unanimously adopted in 2005 at the U.N. World Summit. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.”
“Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,” writes Jean Bricmont in “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.” “Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.”
The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “worthy” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle in “Death of the Liberal Class,” is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world.
On both sides of the Atlantic, there is now discernible fatigue and anger among citizens over the bottomless money pit that is NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
The only wonder is that it has taken so long for the Western public to get wise to the scam.
The disgraceful adulation of a Nazi war criminal by the whole Canadian parliament in a perverse show of solidarity with Ukraine against Russia has helped focus public attention on the obscenity of the NATO proxy war.
All told, since the NATO-induced conflict blew up in February last year, the American and European establishments have thrown up to €200 billion into Ukraine to prop up an odious Nazi-infested regime.
All that largesse that is billed to U.S. and European taxpayers has resulted in a slaughter in Europe not seen since the Second World War – and a failed Ukrainian state. And of course huge profits for the NATO military-industrial complex that bankrolls the elite politicians.
Times are changing though. In the United States, the financially conservative Republicans have had enough of the blank checks to the Kiev regime. The U.S. Congress finally showed a modicum of sanity to prevent a government financial shutdown – by dropping military aid to Ukraine. That shows how twisted Washington’s priorities have become when national self-interest has to wrestle with funding for a Nazi regime.
And then following the Congressional vote to temporarily end funding for Ukraine, the Kiev regime’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba dared to reprimand American lawmakers: “We are now working with both sides of Congress to make sure that it does not (get) repeated under any circumstances.”
Meanwhile in Europe, Slovakian citizens have voted for a new government to end the military fueling of war in Ukraine. The Smer-SD party led by Robert Fico won the parliamentary elections primarily on the vow to shut off any further weapons supply to the Kiev regime.
This week also saw massive protests in Germany against Olaf Scholz’s coalition government over the latter’s abject pro-war policies in Ukraine. German Unity Day on October 3 prompted a mass rally in Berlin denouncing the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and calling for peace negotiations to end the conflict.
There were also unprecedented protests across Poland in Warsaw, Lodz and other cities against the PiS government’s slavish implementation of the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Faced with millions of Ukrainian refugees and neglect of social needs for Poles, the PiS ruling party has recently threatened to end weapons supply to Kiev – a move less about principle and more about trying to buy votes in the forthcoming election on October 15. Nevertheless, the belated move by the Polish government illustrates the concern among European leaders about growing public disdain over the seemingly endless financial aid allocated to Ukraine.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, says it is a “worrying” sign that Washington for the first time closed the coffers for Ukraine.
The EU foreign ministers held a summit in Kiev on Monday. It was the first time that their summit was convened in a non-EU country. The agenda was a little too self-conscious, slated as a show of “solidarity” with Ukraine.
Borrell and the other EU diplomats said the summit was a warning to Russia to not count on “weariness” among Europeans over support for Ukraine. Who is he trying to convince? Russia or Europeans?
The unelected European elites described the war in Ukraine as an “existential crisis” which requires never-ending support for the Nazi regime against Russia.
Such melodrama needs serious qualification. The conflict is only “existential” for certain people: the NATO ideologues, the elitist leaders, the military-industrial complex, and the corrupt Nazi regime in Kiev. But it’s not existential for most other people who want to end this insane slaughter, grotesque wasting of public finances, and perilous flirting with nuclear war.
Significantly, the contrived EU summit in Kiev was not attended by Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto. In highly critical comments on the EU’s misplaced priorities, he said that other countries do not understand why Europe “has made this conflict global” and why people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have to pay for it due to growing inflation, energy prices and unstable food supplies.
The Hungarian diplomat slammed the EU leaders for their double standards and hypocrisy, adding: “I can say that the world outside Europe is already really looking forward to the end of this war because they do not understand many things. They do not understand, for example, how it can be that when a war is not in Europe, the European Union, looking down with fantastic moral superiority, calls on the parties to peace, advocates negotiations and an immediate end to violence. However, when there is a war in Europe, the European Union incites the conflict and supplies weapons, and anyone who talks about peace is immediately stigmatized.”
At least two members of the EU and the NATO alliance – Hungary and Slovakia’s new government – are opposed to the absurd military and financial support fueling the war in Ukraine. Both countries want peace negotiations with Russia to be prioritized. There is an unavoidable sense that this common sense dissent will grow into a domino effect because it is the truth and has an unassailable moral force.
What the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated clearly to the Western public is just how morally bankrupt their governments and media have become. American and European elitist leaders may kid themselves a little longer by pretending there is no weariness and fatigue over their proxy war against Russia. The more they pretend the greater the eventual crash and downfall from public anger.
As Ukraine’s “spring counteroffensive” nears five months of intense fighting and equally intense losses achieving only negligible gains, Kiev’s sponsors in Washington, London, and Brussels find their military stockpiles nearing depletion and their military industrial base stretched far beyond capacity. This single conflict has tested the limits of US military power, diplomatic reach, and economic influence, exposing significant and growing weakness.
At the same time cracks begin to emerge militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the US and among its European allies, the rest of the globe continues its pivot away from the previous US-dominated global order, toward a broader balance of power under multipolarism, further undermining US foreign policy objectives.
Rather than reflect on this paradigm shift and find a rational place for the collective West in this emerging global order, the US and its allies are doubling down in an attempt to reassert their slipping international system and specifically through the use of proxy conflicts.
Just as the US-led collective West is using Ukraine as a focal point to confront, encircle, and contain Russia, the US has maintained Israel as a foothold in the Middle East for decades vis-à-vis Iran and its allies.
In East Asia, the US maintains a presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea and Japan, while expanding its military presence in its former colony of The Philippines. It also has heavily invested in separatist elements on the Chinese island province of Taiwan, setting up the same sort of dynamics seen in Ukraine and Israel that have led to violent conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
It stands to reason that if Washington’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine is unsustainable and a losing proposition, compounding the strain on US military, diplomatic, and economic power by investing in one or more additional proxy wars around the globe will only accelerate the collapse of US primacy around the globe and the rise of multipolarism.
Ukraine: A Failing Proxy War
A recent New York Times article titled, “Has Support for Ukraine Peaked? Some Fear So,” highlights growing concern over Washington’s stretched global ambitions. It notes that with growing hostilities in the Middle East and US military aid now being divided between two US proxies, Ukraine and Israel, there is a growing realization that difficult decisions will be necessary.
The article also admits that even before conflict erupted in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, expanding into a broader and large-scale Israeli military operation against the Palestinians, both support for and interest in Ukraine was already waning.
Beyond political will, the New York Times admits to technical limitations of Western support for its proxies globally.
The article admits:
European vows to supply one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March are falling short, with countries supplying only 250,000 shells from stocks — a little more than one month of Ukraine’s current rate of fire — and factories still gearing up for more production.
Adm. Rob Bauer, who is the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, said in Warsaw that Europe’s military industry had geared up too slowly and still needed to pick up the pace.
It should be noted that a previous New York Times article revealed that Russia is currently producing as many artillery shells annually as the combined output of the US and Europe if production is expanded by 2025 at the earliest.
Even if the West could rally both political and public support for not only Ukraine, but also Israel, the limitations of the West’s combined military industrial base simply cannot deliver the material support needed to match it.
Israeli Military Gears Up For War, Diverts Military Support for Ukraine
Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas raids into Israeli-held territory, the Israeli military has begun carrying out large-scale military operations against the inhabitants of Gaza as well as strikes on southern Lebanon and airports in Syria. A military incursion into Gaza alone will require huge amounts of artillery and aerial munitions, as well as small arms ammuniton.
While the US government claims it is capable of supplying both Israel and Ukraine, it is clear that if support was already falling far short of requirements in Ukraine, dividing it among Ukraine and now Israel means US military support will be stretched even thinner still.
In a Politico article titled, “Planes have already taken off’: U.S. sends Israel air defense, munitions after Hamas attack,” admits:
The needs of the Israelis and Ukrainians are different in some key respects. Israel will rely heavily on precision air-to-ground munitions fired from F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and Apache helicopters, none of which is in the Ukrainian arsenal. The issue of 155mm artillery shells, which both countries rely on heavily, will likely loom large, however.
The US has already transferred 300,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition from stockpiles maintained in Israel for both US and Israeli use, to Ukraine. Now 155mm rounds will be flowing back into Israel.
It should be pointed out that Israel also operates M270 multiple launch rocket systems, which fire the same GPS-guided rockets as the HIMARS vehicles the US transferred to Ukraine. There has so far been no discussion of transferring such rockets to Israel and if this will impact shipments of this ammunition to Ukraine, but as CNN pointed out in a May 2023 article, Ukraine’s daily rate of fire was already a meager 18 rockets.
In 2006, Israel’s failed ground incursion into southern Lebanon was accompanied by an intense nation-wide aerial bombardment of Lebanon using a variety of aerial munitions including guided bombs. In less than a month of intense military operations, Israel’s stockpiles were depleted, and as the New York Times reported at the time, additional munitions were rushed from US stockpiles to Israel.
Protracted Israeli military operations will broaden the drain on US military stockpiles and military industrial output across even more weapons and munitions than Ukraine has.
And Taiwan Too…
It cannot be forgotten that the third focal point of Washington’s Russia-China containment policy, Taiwan, also requires large amounts of munitions to prepare for a conflict the US is openly attempting to provoke with the rest of China.
Even as the US intensifies its pressure on China over Taiwan, America’s stretched military industrial base is struggling to meet even previously agreed upon arms sales.
Bloomberg in its September 2023 article, “Taiwan Arms Supply Is Hobbled by Slow Contractors, US Official Says,” admitted:
Delays in US delivery of promised weapons to Taiwan stem more from defense industry shortcomings than government inefficiency, according to a State Department official handling foreign arms sales.
“We need to work together to encourage our partners in industry to take more risks, be more flexible, diversify their supply chains and act with deliberate speed to expand production capacity,” Mira Resnick, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs, said in prepared remarks for a hearing Tuesday by the House Armed Services Committee.
Expanding physical production facilities, channeling larger amounts of raw materials and basic components into these facilities, and manning them with sufficient human resources depend on other prerequisite investments to be made, such as in construction, mining, upstream manufacturing, and education.
Thus, despite the ease with which US officials demand military industrial production be expanded, doing so is a resource and time-intensive process that will take years if and only if both the US government and Western arms manufacturers agree to significantly expand production. This takes place at the same time both Russia and China continue expanding their own industrial bases, including the production of military equipment, weapons, and ammunition.
For US, proxy wars to have succeeded, Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan would have needed US military industrial production expanded years ago.
It is clear US geostrategic planning attempted to produce a strategy that achieved its objectives with what it had on hand. This strategy was swallowed up in Ukraine, with the remnants being divided between a depleted Ukrainian military and a nascent Israeli military operation that could escalate out of control.
This leaves US policymakers with two options; increasingly extreme and dangerous options including direct interventions in Ukraine, the Middle East, and against China in what could escalate into nuclear war or a pivot away from achieving global primacy and finding a proportional role for the US to play among, rather than above, all other nations.
The future of the United States will take the shape of either an overextended empire involuntarily retreating into irrelevance and destitution, or a powerful member of the multipolar world prioritizing the rebuilding of its industrial base, infrastructure, and its education system to trade with and contribute alongside the rest of the world. The longer the US invests in the former option, the longer and more difficult the transition will be to the latter.
After the Crash 