You almost want to feel sorry for Israel’s professional apologists in mainstream media these days. Their job, a fetid one at best, has been especially trying lately.
First they assure us that Israel has no intention of committing a genocide – and right away they’re refuted by Israel’s own prime minister, who loudly demands the extermination of every man, woman and child in Gaza, not to mention its president’s equally public insistence that Palestinian civilians are legitimate military targets.
Then they struggle to excuse Israel’s bloody attack on one Gaza hospital, only to end up watching Israel’s killing machine obliterate literally all of them. (Not to mention making a mockery of the excuses by providing no evidence that there was ever a “Hamas command center” under al-Shifa, the first of those destroyed hospitals, to begin with.)
Then they try to divert attention from Israeli atrocities by yelping about “mass rape” supposedly committed by the Palestinian fighters who burst from the Gaza concentration camp on October 7. But the ink is hardly dry on their indignant op-eds before their masters in the Chosen State confess that they have no victim testimonies, no forensic evidence and no reliable witnesses to back up any of the claims.
What’s an apologist to do?
Well, if you’re a staff writer at the Atlantic – where rationalizing Israeli crime is a specialty of the house – you can fall back on the lamest canard of all: that the public disgust stirred by Israel’s worst-yet mass murder campaign against Palestinians is really a product of rising “anti-Semitism.”
And sure enough, Atlantic’s April number sports a feature story to that effect by one Franklin Foer with the lachrymose title “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” – because, don’t you see, Americans couldn’t possibly have a respectable motive for getting worked up over a genocide.
Mind you, it takes some high-octane chutzpah to pretend that today’s Big Story is the end of an era for American Jews, at the very moment when American-made bombs and artillery shells are pulverizing Gaza and exterminating its population (half of which consists of children), to the applause of virtually every Jewish communal organization the world over, including inside the US.
But Foer doesn’t lack chutzpah. He’s not only prepared to claim victimhood for Jewish genocide supporters on the grounds that their sachems haven’t been able to stifle all public dissent. He also wants you to believe that the decline of American Jewish power isn’t due to public backlash against bullying by Jewish organizations (think AIPAC, or the sadly misnamed Anti-Defamation League); nor to the exposure of illegal spending sprees with government funds by various Hasidic institutions; nor even to the racist blood lust expressed by almost every prominent Orthodox rabbi in the US since Israel’s genocidal campaign began last October.
No, according to Foer, the real trouble is what he calls “anti-Semitism on the right and the left” – which I guess means “everywhere,” in the US at least. And he’s even prepared to insist that this “anti-Semitism” is not only bad for the Jews; it threatens the American republic, too.
“Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism,” Foer claims. But now, “that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements – MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other – would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish.” Ah, the unaccountable ingratitude of those goyim! I mean – what’s a little genocide between friends?
Setting to one side Foer’s self-righteous reading of American political history, any claim that today’s United States is awash in anti-Semitism is obviously silly. Quite apart from opinion polls – which tell a tale very different from Foer’s – popular culture is a convenient point of reference in such matters, and it’s hard to see how a society permeated with Jew-hatred would have showered no fewer than twenty Oscar nominations last year on films that celebrate already-famous American Jews. And then there’s the large number of American Jews who have participated in the anti-genocide protests that so trouble Foer – a datum that, standing alone, suffices to refute his imputation of anti-Jewish bigotry to the protesters.
But Foer is right about one thing. A privileged chapter in diaspora Jewish history is coming to an end – though not for the reason he gives. The simple truth (though Foer cannot admit it) is that the American public is getting tired of being bullied by a greedy and hypersensitive Jewish elite that, like a spoiled child, has insisted on having its way for years in everything from Mideast policy to the distribution of government benefits, and is now finally overplaying its hand.
And if that Jewish “leadership” really has squandered its measure of imperially-funded impunity by embracing a genocide – at a moment when the fabric of US politics is too strained for an ultra-divisive issue and too cash-poor to give away the extra billions that Israel is demanding to finance its crimes – it is quite possible that Foer has stumbled onto another truth as well: that the wreckage from the fall of the Jewish elite will doom whatever is left of American democracy.
To make sense of these claims, a short summary of recent history is in order. It is well known that since the end of World War II Jews in the West have come to enjoy a degree of freedom, prosperity and political influence that is without precedent in the Jewish diaspora.
Unsurprisingly, American Jews have generally welcomed this development. And given the horrors that preceded it, culminating in the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the 1940s, it’s not hard to understand why Jewish elites in the US focused at first on securing their hard-won position in any way they could, taking advantage of new opportunities and assimilating themselves to preexisting power structures.
But after 1967, as Israel settled into a new role as one of Washington’s key client states, what had been prudence morphed into braggadocio. Norman Podhoretz set the tone, vowing that henceforth American Jews would “resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm” – a boast that meant in practice (to quote the superb scholar Norman Finkelstein) that “American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying.”
Less privileged constituencies may be forgiven for not seeing that period as a “golden age,” as Foer does, but you can reject his twisted perspective and still agree that the postwar joy ride of Jewish “leadership” is probably coming to an end.
After all, why shouldn’t it?
Today’s United States is not the United States of 1945, nor even the United States of 1967. The American public now is as deeply divided as in the last decades of the 18th century, when armed rebellions and secession plots were recurring realities. The presidential election scheduled for this November – assuming it happens at all (the Democratic Party seems to be trying to convert the balloting system into a prearranged election-by-lawfare) – is likely to exacerbate differences rather than resolve them, with potentially disastrous results. Worse, given the massive attack on civil rights that was launched four years ago on the pretext of a COVID-19 “medical emergency” – an attack that included the deliberate undermining of the electoral process in many states – it is not even clear whether the necessary conditions for democracy exist any longer in the US.
Meanwhile, consumer prices have skyrocketed, workers are suffering massive layoffs, and the small business economy, crippled by the COVID coup, has been unable to compensate for the damage.
Why should a citizenry in such straits continue to give preferential treatment to an overbearing Jewish elite that 1) clearly doesn’t need it, and 2) flaunts its allegiance to a foreign power even as it demands favors from American institutions at every opportunity? (Anyone who needs an introduction to the fraudulent practices this elite will resort to, and the extent to which it has entangled US government in its chicanery, need only read Norman Finkelstein’s copiously documented The Holocaust Industry for some useful details.) By any standard, American Jews have enjoyed an extraordinary run over the last fifty years; it’s about time we were treated just like everybody else – no worse, but no better either.
The (mis)behavior of Jewish “leadership” is exacerbating the problem. Instead of absorbing the message of the writing on the wall and prudently lowering its profile, it is going for broke, intensifying its financial and political demands in support of Israel’s genocidal slaughter – the worst possible issue seized at the worst possible moment. Not even warning growls from old allies like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have had any noticeable effect. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Jewish “leaders” seem intent on plunging ahead toward their own inevitable destruction.
And I fear that they will not fall alone. Gaza is far from being Joe Biden’s only problem this year. But as the Palestinian death toll soars, and the pictures of shredded or starving children become ever more numerous and intolerable, the Gaza genocide could end up being the last straw that breaks the back of Biden’s reelection propaganda.
Genocide Joe’s problem with Gaza is that there is no real escape from it: Biden cannot ignore the issue but also cannot afford to resolve it. If he grows an embryonic conscience and finally brings Israel to heel (at least temporarily), he will pay a heavy price with Jewish voting blocs in November. If he doesn’t, a regional Mideast war could be in the offing, and I doubt that any American administration could survive the fallout from such a debacle.
I am not about to shed any tears for Joe Biden or for the Democratic Party. But if the current government collapses, what will replace it? An ad hoc coalition around the former Narcissist-in-Chief? A caretaker administration effectively under the sway of US intelligence agencies? A COVID coup-inspired government by executive fiat? The prospects are not encouraging.
Meanwhile, the 1,000 American troops now being sent to Israel/Palestine – ostensibly to build a “humanitarian port” for Gaza – may end up, for all I know, as a striking force behind a coup designed to oust Netanyahu and to put the US directly in control of a client state gone rogue. No one familiar with the CIA’s record can rule out such a possibility. But how will an American working class that already resents the billions of dollars annually thrown away on “aid” to Israel (while average American families can’t pay the rent and the heating bill at the same time) react to the idea of turning the Jewish State into an expensive US protectorate? What if those American troops start dying in new wars in Lebanon or Iran? How much can Americans be expected to pay for Israel’s rapaciousness?
I certainly do not know where any of this will lead. But I’m finding it very hard to imagine a happy ending to the story. I’ve already mentioned my doubts about whether the presuppositions required of a democracy exist in today’s United States. One of those presuppositions is the assumption of shared goals (Lessing, following Aristotle, went so far as to describe this as “friendship”) between the members of differing political factions. But can I really acknowledge any sort of common cause with a supporter of genocide? To be honest, I’m still not sure I can use a word like “friendship” to describe my relationship to someone who, just a few years ago, denied my right of movement, my right to be governed by democratic processes, my right to speak my mind without being censored, my right not to be a human guinea pig, and even my right to breathe freely. And I can’t forget that there were many, many such people.
What I’m finding really ominous is that so many enemies of American freedom over the last four years are now quietly cozying up to Israel’s genocide lest they upset the Democratic Party applecart – and are demanding that the American public do the same. Rebecca Solnit, one of those “progressive feminists” who helped to publicize every democracy-destroying lie of the COVID coup, from masks to coerced human medical experimentation, doesn’t mince words about the dangers of Republican politicians: according to her, they have “abandoned all ethics and standards, and will happily violate the oaths they took to uphold the constitution”; in fact, she claims that “[v]iral Trumpism has already merged with conspiracy theories such as QAnon, with anti-vaccine cults, with white supremacists and neo-fascists.” But the prolific Ms. Solnit has gone strangely tongue-tied about the slaughter-plus-systematic-starvation of more than a million children in Gaza.
Gloria Steinem, another “progressive” who bailed on the “my body, my choice” principle as soon as a Democratic Party administration demanded the injection of federal employees with untested drugs, was quick to denounce Palestinians over charges of sexual violence that were probably fabricated. But she too has been practically silent about the slaughter in Gaza, not to mention the well-documented sexual violence committed by Israelis against female Palestinian prisoners. And so on, and so on, and so on.
I mention these examples because I think they expose, like a lantern in a shadowy room, the cruel emptiness belied by all the liberal gesturing. The tragic truth is that the Democratic Party and its mouthpieces are not offering us an alternative to Donald Trump. They are using Trump’s name as hunters use beaters, to induce frightened prey to stampede into their nets. They are not, as some critics believe, political ideologues; they are really more like political parasites, forced to feed on the vital energies and principles of others because they have none themselves.
That is where Democratic Party apologists meet the crime-rationalizing rhetoricians of American Jewish “leadership.” Even genocide, the most heinous of all crimes against humanity, doesn’t move such people, because where they should have hearts capable of empathy with suffering or of anger at injustice, all they’ve really got is a craving for power and a dread of losing it.
And so it turns out that the Jewish elites who are hell-bent on maintaining their undeserved privileges – so much so that they’ll embrace Nazi crimes to do it – are forcing the pitiful hollowness of America’s political elites into public view. That is the real disaster that Franklin Foer, who wants to keep both elites in power, cannot see. His pastiche of anodyne falsehoods is intended to divert public attention from the horror of Israel’s intensifying crimes in occupied Palestine. But he is really laying the groundwork for the radical disillusionment of the American public – a disillusionment that could bring down the entire political process when a generation of its victims realizes how recklessly and how cynically it has been deceived.
Yes, the American Jewish joy ride is probably about to end – and with a bang, not a whimper. The real questions are all about what happens next. How many Americans (and others) are going to be hurt in the crash? How many will get out of the way in time? How many will be ready with aid for the victims when the debris finally settles?
And what will be left – after so much cruel and needless damage – of what we used to call “the land of the free, the home of the brave”?
Tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.
Cue the rise of protest laws, which take the government’s intolerance for free speech to a whole new level and send the resounding message that resistance is futile.
Weaponized by police, prosecutors, courts and legislatures, these protest laws, along with free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, and a host of other legalistic maladies have become a convenient means by which to punish individuals who refuse to be muzzled.
In Florida, for instance, legislators passed a “no-go” zone law making it punishable by up to 60 days in jail to remain within 25 feet of working police and other first responders after a warning.
Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are sold to the public as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.
It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, no-go zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.
No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.
This is the painful lesson being imparted with every incident in which someone gets arrested and charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers-that-be.
These assaults on free speech are nothing new.
As Human Rights Watch points out, “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”
Journalists have come under particular fire for exercising their right to freedom of the press.
According to U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, the criminalization of routine journalism has become a means by which the government chills lawful First Amendment activity.
Journalists have been arrested or faced dubious charges for “publishing,” asking too many questions of public officials, being “rude” for reporting during a press conference, and being in the vicinity of public protests and demonstrations.
It’s gotten so bad that merely daring to question, challenge or hesitate when a cop issues an order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct.
Philadelphia lawyer Rebecca Musarra was arrested for exercising her right to remain silent and refusing to answer questions posed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. (Note: she cooperated in every other way by providing license and registration, etc.)
These incidents reflect a growing awareness about the state of free speech in America: you may have distinct, protected rights on paper, but dare to exercise those rights, and you risk fines, arrests, injuries and even death.
Unfortunately, we have been circling this particular drain hole for some time now.
More than 50 years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas took issue with the idea that merely speaking to a government representative (a right enshrined in the First Amendment) could be perceived as unlawfully inconveniencing and annoying the police.
In a passionate defense of free speech, Douglas declared:
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet. The situation might have indicated that Colten’s techniques were ill-suited to the mission he was on, that diplomacy would have been more effective. But at the constitutional level speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive.
It’s a power-packed paragraph full of important truths that the powers-that-be would prefer we quickly forget: We the people are the sovereigns. We have the final word. We can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy. We need not stay docile and quiet. Our speech can be disruptive. It can invite dispute. It can be provocative and challenging. We do not have to bow submissively to authority or speak with reverence to government officials.
In theory, Douglas was right: “we the people” do have a constitutional right to talk back to the government.
In practice, however, we live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.
Case in point: Tony Rupp, a lawyer in Buffalo, NY, found himself arrested and charged with violating the city’s noise ordinance after cursing at an SUV bearing down on pedestrians on a busy street at night with its lights off. Because that unmarked car was driven by a police officer, that’s all it took for Rupp to find himself subjected to malicious prosecution, First Amendment retaliation and wrongful arrest.
The case, as Jesse McKinley writes in The New York Times, is part of a growing debate over “how citizens can criticize public officials at a time of widespread reevaluation of the lengths and limits of free speech. That debate has raged everywhere from online forums and college campuses to protests over racial bias in law enforcement and the Israel-Hamas war. Book bans and other acts of government censorship have troubled some First Amendment experts. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments about a pair of laws — in Florida and Texas — limiting the ability of social media companies such as Facebook to ban certain content from their platforms.”
Bottom line: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t resist.
What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
Yet there can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.
What is this language of force?
Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons.Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.
This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.
Unfortunately, this is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to speak freely.
If we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws by voicing our opinions in public or on our clothing or before a legislative body, then we do not have free speech.
What we have instead is regulated, controlled, censored speech, and that’s a whole other ballgame.
Remember, the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to challenge government agents, think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.
Americans are being brainwashed into believing that anyone who wears a government uniform—soldier, police officer, prison guard—must be obeyed without question.
Of course, the Constitution takes a far different position, but does anyone in the government even read, let alone abide by, the Constitution anymore?
The government does not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully. And it definitely does not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Yet by muzzling the citizenry, by removing the constitutional steam valves that allow people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world, the government is creating a climate in which violence becomes inevitable.
When there is no First Amendment steam valve, then frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.
As John F. Kennedy warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.
Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.
According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.
The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.
In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.
SHIFT TO AUTHORITARIANISM
The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.
In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes) for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.
This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.
Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.
To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.
The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.
At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.
The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.
NET-ZERO AGENDA
But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?
Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.
Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.
But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.
He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:
“The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.”
All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.
Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.
Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.
It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.
Here’s a quote from it:
“Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.”
Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.
However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.
The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.
FAKE GREEN
The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.
It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.
Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.
It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.
Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.
The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.
In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.
It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.
That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.
That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.
The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.
Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”
The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.
What is going on?
The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.
This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.
Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.
All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.
Global Disease
The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.
Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.
This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.
“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”
Global Surveillance
Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.
Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.
Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:
“The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”
Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).
Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.
Global War Profiteering
War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.
Global Policing
Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.
There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.
This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.
The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.
Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Are you starting to get the picture now?
The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.
On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.
Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.
While this article will focus on the genocide in Gaza, it is important to recognize that this genocide against the Palestinians – second only in its severity to the original Nabka in 1948 – is simply exploiting longstanding Zionist aspirations to play a key part in fulfilling a wider Elite program.
If you prefer watching film, this four-part series does an excellent job with archival footage to also illustrate the long history of Zionist planning, political manipulation and imperial collusion that generated and maintains the extraordinary violence inflicted on the people of Palestine. See ‘Al-Nabka: The Palestinian catastrophe – Episodes 1-4’.
But whichever way(s) you acquire a deeper understanding of what has taken place and why it is still taking place, several things will become clear. Most notably for me was (again) perceiving the sheer terror and insanity (and thus warped worldview and predisposition to violence) of those ‘behind’ the entire enterprise from the beginning right through to those responsible for imposing it now. I have discussed this issue many times previously, including here: ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
And if you would like to read the 23 emotional characteristics that define the psychological profile of ‘archetype perpetrators of violence’ (such as people like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and the Elite figures who put people like this in place), you can do so in the document ‘Why Violence?’ pp.12-15.
This partly explains why the amount of time it takes to kill or displace the bulk of the Palestinian population is of no consequence to Elite agents, including the Israeli and US governments, despite some authors expressing concern that the death of Israeli soldiers is costing the Israeli government support for its genocidal invasion. See ‘Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency’.
This is because it is neither the Israeli government nor the government of the United States orchestrating this genocide, even though it appears to constitute the latest manifestation of C19th Zionist aspirations to create a Jewish ‘homeland’ in an ethnically cleansed Palestine. Hence, what the respective electorates of Israel and the United States think of this genocide is inconsequential to their governments. The governments answer to a higher power.
But with Elite plans for all cities extensively documented in the ‘smart city’ literature readily available, there remains much more to make Gaza, particularly following its recent substantial destruction, into the technocratic prison that Elite planners envisage for us all.
This was highlighted by Elon Musk’s latest visit to Israel to discuss ‘the operation of Starlink satellite internet in Gaza’ with Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, during which it was made clear that deployment of the satellites – a critical foundation stone that enables creation of the new technocratic surveillance and control-oriented ‘smart cities’ – is already being planned even while the genocide is still being conducted and whatever ‘humanitarian’ slant might be attached to their deployment in the short-term. The agreement between Musk’s company SpaceX and Israel allows the company’s Starlink Internet satellites to operate in the Gaza Strip ‘with the approval of the Israeli ministry of communication’. See ‘Has Power of Starlink Turned Elon Musk Into Tech Oligarch?’ and ‘Elon Musk’s Power as Geopolitical Arbiter Signals “Decay” of US State’.
After all, even with Gaza largely populated by Israeli settlers, Elite plans to imprison us all in ‘smart’ cities means that there is no distinction between Palestinians and ‘ordinary’ Israelis when it comes to how the future population of Gaza will be treated.
If you would like to read an account of how the televised genocide in Gaza is being used to advance the Elite program – including the extensive interests of the Rothschild family – while some sections of the world (including the UN, various national leaders, some Islamic and Arabic organizations and members of the protesting public) complain powerlessly, even while Hamas and its allies within Gaza and the West Bank as well as in the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Syria, the Ansar Allah [Houthis] in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq) offer military resistance, you can do so in this article: ‘Will Palestine Ever Be Free? Understanding Elite Strategy in the Global Context’.
The problem is simple. Whether in politics or in other domains, while listening to what people say it is imperative to observe what they do. While articles such as these document a range of actors from the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, prominent actors in West Asia such as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and others in key Arab and Muslim states suggesting what Israel should do to end the genocide, none of them is willing to take any action that would force Israel’s hand, such as cut off weapons supplies, or even take action that would seriously impede Israel’s genocidal assault. The unspoken message to Israel is as follows: ‘We will make ourselves look good by calling on you Israelis to take some token action to end the genocide but we won’t get in your way. So go ahead.’
And it has never troubled the Elite (and thus its agents) about what might appear to be happening. To reiterate, it is no ‘strategic defeat’ for Israel, as some commentators have argued, or even a ‘political defeat of Israel on the global stage’ because it ignored ‘the fundamental precepts of international humanitarian law’ and allowed itself ‘to be characterized as a practitioner of genocide, and its actions against Gaza as war crimes’. See ‘Israel Headed for Strategic Defeat in Gaza’.
So why don’t these issues concern the Elite and its agents? The answer is simple: As explained below, at the superficial level, the Elite knows that it cannot be held accountable (and it can protect those of its agents that it chooses for as long as it chooses). But there is a more fundamental reason which I will explain after briefly elaborating why the Elite knows it cannot be held accountable.
First, international law is a toothless tiger. Moreover, there is no national jurisdiction that can hold the Elite accountable either. The Elite is immune from prosecution in any court, anywhere.
So don’t be impressed/deceived by governments ‘calling for a ceasefire’ or its various equivalents, UN resolutions, scholars and others signing statements, calls for accountability under international law and large numbers of people signing petitions or protesting. Whatever the level of revulsion expressed, history teaches us that such actions mean nothing but are useful in convincing the ill-informed wider public that ‘something is being done’. It isn’t.
And this brings us to the most fundamental issue: For the Elite, ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ in limited contexts such as Gaza is not important. Killing as many people as possible, enslaving those left alive (these days, technocratically), redistributing wealth and reshaping world order to enhance Elite control are the desired outcomes. As has been the case for the past 230 years at least.
This is why, for example, the United States has been engaged in perpetual war since World War II, has conducted a wide range of coups d’état (‘regime changes’) or otherwise militarily intervened in other countries. See Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.
The point is this: These wars killed millions of people (mainly civilians), enslaved many people (by forcing them into the periphery of the world economy), transferred enormous wealth to the Elite in a wide range of ways and consolidated Elite control. So it matters nought to the Elite if the US government is $34trillion dollars in debt – see US Debt Clock – and much of the US population impoverished.
But to return our attention to Gaza: If you want an accurate understanding of what is actually being done, just keep an eye out for any individual, government, international organization or other entity taking action that actually impedes the genocide and/or moves Palestine closer to liberation.
And people participating in the ongoing Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement – see ‘Act Now Against These Companies Profiting from the Genocide of the Palestinian People’ – are leading the resistance to the Israeli occupation and genocide in the nonviolent realm, although a great deal more needs to be done in this realm for it to have the strategic impact necessary to succeed.
My point is straightforward: After documenting ‘this catastrophe for the Palestinians’, long-time and highly regarded scholar Professor John Mearsheimer poses ‘one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?’ See ‘Death and Destruction in Gaza’.
The answer, of course, is ‘no’. Elite agents, whether in Israel or the US (or elsewhere), do as they are directed, and morality of any kind is not a consideration. If wars and genocides throughout history, including the C20th, have taught us anything, it is that ‘decency’ is not a factor that enters into Elite deliberations when mass killing is organized and perpetrated to serve Elite ends. And anyone with a cursory knowledge of history and the capacity to analyze should know this too.
In essence, if the primary objectives of Hamas – notably including statehood for Palestine, the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and an end to Israeli settler and police incursions into the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem: see the Hamas document ‘Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ – are used as the measure of progress (as they should be), then the results are little short of catastrophic so far.
How even ‘winning’ the war in Gaza, assuming this ultimately occurs, achieves Palestinian statehood is problematic, to put it mildly; so far only about 240 Palestinian detainees and prisoners out of 5,000 – see ‘Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli custody’ – have been released in exchange for over 100 Israeli hostages; and there is no mention in anything I have read that suggests that any progress has been made on putting in place a protocol for ending Israeli civilian and police incursions into the al-Aqsa mosque, with the latest Good Shepherd Collective report advising ‘Settlers continue with their program to change the status quo at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, with armed incursions.’ See ‘Weekly Report’.
So the only clear tangible gain for Hamas so far (in relation to its apparent objectives) is some 240 released prisoners.
The strategic reality is that halting the genocide in Gaza and, ultimately, liberating Palestine while also defeating imposition of the global technocracy which this conflict is facilitating, will not be achieved by such tactics.
And the genocide will not be halted, Palestine liberated or the advancing global technocracy impeded by those solidarity groups, such as Palestine Action in the UK, that campaign against Elbit (Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer) by encouraging secretive acts of sabotage by individuals or small ‘cells’ – see ‘The Underground Manual’ – despite occasional apparent ‘victories’. See ‘Palestine Action Campaign Leads to Fisher German Ending Ties with Elbit’.
Halting the Genocide in Gaza and Ending the Occupation of Palestine using Nonviolent Strategy
If the genocide is to be halted and the occupation ended, it will require a substantial mobilization of people to participate in a comprehensive strategically-oriented campaign that precisely identifies the tactics to be undertaken (not just a random list of actions) and, as the historical record demonstrates, not by using secrecy and sabotage in their execution. For detailed explanations of these points, see The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.
Before proceeding, if you doubt that a nonviolent strategy can halt a genocide in progress, you can read a solid account of when this has occurred historically and how it was accomplished in the section titled ‘Nonviolent Defense Against an Extremely Ruthless Opponent’ on pp.238-245 of the book just cited.
But if we are able to mobilize enough people to halt the genocide, we will be in a stronger position to keep struggling to end the occupation as well so, strategically speaking, it is useful to see these two political purposes as related.
And while defeating the attempt to impose a global technocracy on us all will require a worldwide mobilization far beyond what has even begun yet, success in Palestine could bolster these efforts. After all, what is happening in Gaza is coming to us all, one way or another, although few people are aware of this yet.
Anyway, to illustrate what both a nonviolent strategy to halt the genocidal assault by Israel against Gaza and a nonviolent strategy to liberate Palestine would entail, I have reproduced below just nineteen ‘consolidated’ strategic goals, written in a form appropriate for this particular context, taken from the comprehensive but generalized list of 50 ‘Strategic Goals for Defeating a Genocidal Assault’.
In most cases, I have also briefly explained the value of that strategic goal and perhaps offered examples, either historically or in the current context, where tactics in pursuit of that goal have been undertaken.
This incomplete/consolidated list of strategic goals is based on principles not explained here but carefully elaborated on the website just identified. Needless to say, it is a straightforward task to consult the full list of strategic goals (to halt a genocide or liberate an occupied country) and reword each of the remaining goals to make it appropriate to the Palestinian situation and nominate the specific groups that should be mentioned where appropriate.
Thus, just nineteen strategic goals that would contribute both to defeating Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and liberating Palestine (which conform to the formula described on the website) are listed below (with brief explanations and historical examples where appropriate). It should be noted, however, that the list would be considerably longer as individual organizations – such as each organization involved in inciting, facilitating, organizing, conducting and/or benefiting from the genocide (for whatever reason but including national and religious groups with competing perspectives as well as corporations involved in media, banking and resource extraction) – should be specified separately.
Of course, individual groups within the defense would usually accept responsibility for focusing their work on achieving just one or two of the strategic goals. It is the responsibility of the struggle’s strategic leadership to ensure that each of the strategic goals (identified and prioritized according to local circumstances) is being addressed (or to prioritize if resource limitations require this).
If there is no identified strategic leadership, individuals and local groups should proceed to tackle those strategic goals most relevant to their circumstances, interests and capacities.
(1) To cause the people of Palestine(men, women and children) to identify their support for, and participation in, the Palestinian resistance strategy by wearing a symbol of Palestinian unity (a keffiyeh,as a head covering or scarf, orthe colors of the Palestinian flag: black, white, green and red) and by boycotting all corporate/governmentmedia and social media outlets that support the genocide in Gaza and/or the occupation of Palestine.
(2) To cause the people of Israel(men, women and children) to identify their solidarity with the people of Palestineand opposition to the genocide and occupation by wearing a symbol of solidarity(a keffiyeh,as a head covering or scarf, orthe colors of the Palestinian flag: black, white, green and red) and by boycotting all corporate/governmentmedia and social media outlets that support the genocide in Gaza and/or the occupation of Palestine.
Government and corporate media and social media have long been used to control the narrative regarding what is happening in Palestine. If you choose to boycott these outlets, in favor of outlets committed to telling you the truth, you play a valuable role in holding media that lies accountable and supporting those telling the truth who are often suppressed.
(3) To cause people elsewhere in the world(men, women and children) to identify their solidarity with the people of Palestineand opposition to the genocide and occupation by wearing a symbol of solidarity(a keffiyeh,as a head covering or scarf, orthe colors of the Palestinian flag: black, white, green and red) and by boycotting all corporate/governmentmedia and social media outlets that support the genocide in Gaza and/or the occupation of Palestine.
(4) To cause young people in Israel to resist conscription and recruitment into the military, police, intelligence services and other forces/organizations inciting, facilitating, organizing and/or conducting the genocide or maintaining the occupation of Palestine.
For example, prior to the current genocide and despite four stints in prison, 19-year-old Israeli woman Hallel Rabin resolutely stood her ground, refusing to serve in the Israeli army occupying Palestine. This article includes a video of Rabin speaking eloquently about her reasons for resisting. See ‘Refusing to serve in the army is my small act of making change’.
And despite the risk of a significant jail sentence, Ariel Davidov, a 19-year-old Israeli ‘refusenik’ believes that ‘not joining the army is one of the most effective things you can do’ to ‘end the cycle of violence’. See ‘Why Israeli army refusers are crucial to ending the cycle of violence’.
These intelligent and conscientious young people are far from alone and highlight the possibilities open to those of us who choose to mobilize an effective nonviolent resistance to violence, wherever it occurs in the world.
We just need their commitment and courage.
(5) To cause soldiers, airmen, sailors, intelligence personnel, drone pilots and others in the Israeli military to refuse to obey orders that will lead to the arrest, assault, torture, shooting, bombing and other forms of harm to Palestinians, medical personnel, foreign aid workers, journalists, solidarity activists and othersin Palestine.
Of course, the right and duty to make decisions based on conscience were enshrined in international law a long time ago, including in Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter: ‘The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of [their] Government or of a superior does not relieve [them] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to [them]’. See ‘Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal 1950’.
And the historical record demonstrates that dialogue and nonviolent action designed to convince troops to disobey their orders have sometimes been successful. For example, it was a vital element of the Czechoslovakian resistance to the Warsaw Pact invasion during 1968, it was the defining feature of the nonviolent revolution in the Philippines in 1986, it was the crucial factor in thwarting the Chinese government’s first attempt to clear Tiananmen Square on 20 May 1989, and it was fundamental to the defeat of the Soviet coup in 1991. See The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach. pp.256-8.
Individuals in Israel who make such conscience-based choices are supported by Mesarvot, one of the organizations that supports Israeli ‘refuseniks’ in a campaign against the occupation of Palestine.
[An earlier organization – Yesh Gvul (‘There is a limit’) – was founded in 1982 ‘as a political movement aimed at supporting refuseniks and conscientious objectors’. It now appears to be inactive.]
But the potential for something more significant might be inferred from this article by Shimri Zameret, a soldier who conscientiously resisted participation in the Israeli military response to the Palestinian second Intifada, spending 21 months in prison as a result, and now comments on disquiet within the military for the anti-democratic ‘reforms’ pursued by Netanyahu in 2023. See ‘A mass wave of Israeli army refusal could be a transformative moment’.
Zameret and many others are part of another organization – the Refuser Solidarity Network – that also supports soldiers opposed to the occupation and the policies (genocidal and otherwise) that derive from it.
In any case, there is enough evidence of disquiet among young Israeli conscripts and serving soldiers (and possibly personnel in other services, such as the intelligence services) concerned about participating in the genocide and occupation to make it strategically worthwhile for people, whether in Israel or elsewhere, to contact serving personnel with encouragement to consider their conscience about the moral path in this context and offers to listen while they deliberate.
(6) To cause the private military contractors (mercenaries) employed by the Israeli Army to refuse to participate in the genocide in Gaza and/or in maintenance of the occupation.
According to one source, there are an estimated 28,000 mercenaries in the Israeli military. This constitutes a heavy drain on the Israeli economy, which is now being threatened by various measures. See ‘Gaza Exhausted Israel’s Economy’.
Apart from efforts to dissuade foreign soldiers from joining the Israeli military, increasing pressure on the Israeli economy will make it difficult for ordinary Israelis impacted – as Mohandas K. Gandhi understood the Indian boycott of cloth imports from Manchester in defence of the indigenous khadi industry would make it difficult for workers in England – but the Israeli leadership will endeavour to hold out against enormous pressure as it will be directed to do. Nevertheless, there are many measures that can be taken, including those outlined below, to keep this pressure building.
(7) To cause the officers in the Israeli police and Shin Bet (the security agency) in Israel to refuse to obey orders toinflict violence on Israeli nonviolent activists and to arrest, assault, torture and shoot Palestinians, medical personnel, foreign aid workers, journalists, solidarity activists and othersin Palestine.
Again, there are many historical precedents around the world of police refusing orders to inflict violence on populations they police, including during the lockdowns imposed as part of the restrictions enforced under the recent Covid-19 regime. See ‘Policing the Elite’s Technocracy: How Do We Resist This Effectively?’
And there is already substantial dissatisfaction within the Israeli Police for various reasons, leading significant numbers to leave the force. A key reason for the dissatisfaction is that senior officers are often abusive of lower ranks (in various ways) and, whether in the police or Shin Bet, punishment of these officers is virtually non-existent (or trivial when it happens). See ‘Why do so many Israel Police officers quit?’
Fortunately, the long legacy of nonviolent struggle in extremely violent contexts has much to teach nonviolent activists about dealing powerfully with such situations. This article offers 20 ideas of use in both the Israeli and Palestinian contexts: ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.
Not every police or Shin Bet officer will follow orders to be violent unthinkingly. Our challenge is to amplify their inclination to do what is right, irrespective of the orders they are given.
(8) To cause military personnel in the military forces of Israeli-allied countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere to refuse deployment to the conflict zone near Israel and Palestine.
Since then, the United States has set up and deployed ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’, a multinational coalition supposedly intended ‘to help protect merchant ships in the Red Sea area from drones and missiles’ fired by Yemen’s Ansar Allah against vessels perceived to be supporting, directly or indirectly, Israel’s attacks on Gaza. See ‘US unveils international force to defend Red Sea. Here’s what we know’.
This can also be resisted by people, including anti-war activists, in the various countries (the United States, United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain) that are deploying troops and weapons systems to the region by taking targeted nonviolent action against weapons producers and the troops facing deployment to the region. As always, see the list of possible actions in the article ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.
(9)To cause members of trade unions and professional associations, activist groups, religious bodies, women’s organizations, student bodies, consumer groups andethnic groups, as well as artists, musicians, intellectuals and members of other key social groupsin Israel to resist the genocide and the occupation by encouraging their members to boycott all government/corporate media and social media that support the genocide or occupation and to withdraw their labor [temporarily/permanently] from any organization complicit in the genocide and/or occupation.
And while loudly condemned by most of his fellow MPs in the Israeli Knesset, Ofer Cassif had the courage to sign a petition in support of the hearing at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. In response to his widespread condemnation, Cassif noted ‘I will not give up the fight for our existence as a moral society. This is true patriotism…’. See ‘Balls of Steel’.
While it will clearly take stronger actions than these to halt the genocide, like the efforts of those young Israelis resisting conscription into the Israeli military, they are undertaken by those who have a conscience and the courage to live it and all movements for justice are built on such individuals.
No doubt Israel has plenty more yet and one of our tasks is to encourage Israelis to act and support them when they do. There are plenty of people in the United States and elsewhere who could usefully focus some effort on contacting Israelis they know and encouraging them to take a conscientious stand (and perhaps listen supportively while any individual considers such a course).
As mentioned above, there are trade unions, professional associations, religious bodies, women’s organizations and a great many other groups in Israel that can be approached to ask their members to boycott media supporting the genocide/occupation and to consider withdrawing their labor from organizations that are complicit.
The wider the resistance is spread, the less pressure there is on any one individual.
(10) To cause members of trade unions and professional associations, activist groups, religious bodies, women’s organizations, student bodies, consumer groups andethnic groups, as well as artists, musicians, intellectuals and members of other key social groupsin countries in which governments are complicit in the genocide (including the USA, UK, Germany and other European countries particularly) to resist the genocide and the occupation by encouraging their members to boycott all government/corporate media and social media that support the genocide or occupation and to withdraw their labor [temporarily/permanently] from any organization complicit in the genocide and/or occupation.
The point is that this discontent is everywhere and, at some point, the more courageous will act and inspire many around them, whatever organization in which they work.
And other forms of resistance that are especially effective in that particular context can be considered. Again, for inspiration, consider ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.
(11) To cause members of trade unions and labor organizations, activist groups, religious bodies, women’s organizations, student bodies, consumer groups andethnic groups, as well as artists, musicians, intellectuals and members of other key social groupsin countries in which governments are complicit in the genocide (including the USA, UK, Germany and other European countries particularly) to resist the genocide and the occupation by encouraging their members to boycott those products that are extracted (or produced)and exported by corporations acting in concert with the Israeli government.
While Felicity Arbuthnot, in the 2013 article just cited, nominated the interest of the BG Group in Gaza’s gas and oil reserves, in early 2016, the BG Group became part of Shell Global. See ‘Combining Shell and BG: a simpler and more profitable company’.
Of course, Shell has been a Rothschild corporation since the very early 20th century. According to the Rothschild Archive: ‘As it turned out, Rothschilds had a decisive influence in shaping Royal Dutch Shell, more so than anyone had previously imagined.’ See ‘Searching for oil in Roubaix’. But Shell does not represent the only Rothschild investment in energy supplies.
Consequently, widespread and persistent consumer boycotts that target Shell, Chevron (for which the key brand names are Texaco and Caltex) and Siemens products could play a valuable role in compelling these corporations, and their Elite owners, to reconsider their role in sponsoring the genocide and occupation.
(12) To cause people in your country to boycott Israel as a tourist destination.
The genocide in Gaza has had a significant, adverse impact on the Israeli economy. See ‘Gaza Exhausted Israel’s Economy’. Causing people to boycott Israel as a tourist destination (in favor of traveling elsewhere) is an effective way to reduce Israeli government finance available for the genocide and occupation.
An important subset of this, which focuses more on removing the apparent legitimacy attached to Israeli institutions, is advocated by the BDS Movement and involves the encouragement of academics, prominent entertainers, cultural figures (such as writers and artists) and sportspeople to boycott Israel. See ‘Academic Boycott’ and ‘Cultural Boycott’. Individuals in this category can set a powerful example for their colleagues/fans.
(13) To cause the workers in the trade unions andprofessional associationsthat work for individual weapons corporations (such as Elbit Systems, Rafael, Lockheed Martin and Boeing)that supply weapons to the Israeli militaryto withdraw their labor [partially/wholly], [temporarily/permanently].
Thus, whether in relation to an Israeli weapons corporation, such as Elbit Systems and Rafael, or a weapons corporation in the US, the UK, Germany or other countries that supply weapons to Israel, each trade union and/or professional association representing employees working for the corporation is effectively supporting individuals to participate in enabling the genocide and maintenance of the occupation.
Individuals and organizations can be encouraged to choose not to do so using a variety of means, always beginning with dialogue but then, if the issue cannot be resolved through listening and clear communication, using a range of nonviolent tactics at worksites, ranging from demonstrations and picket lines to blockades. But again, plenty of options here: ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.
(14) To cause corporations that provide vital services/components to weapons corporations that supply weapons to Israel to cease doing so.
But there are a great many possibilities as the sheer diversity of parts in military weapons means that many corporations are drawn into the staggering array of supply lines. Choosing those services and components that are more specific and critical to military impact – including command, control, communications, delivery, targeting – rather than some insignificant, generic part, will ensure strategic value derives from success in any campaign.
If this isn’t feasible (or efforts fail) in a particular context, consider the following strategic goal.
(15) To cause the workers in the relevant trade unions or labor organizations to withdraw their labor [temporarily/permanently] [partially/wholly] from those corporations that supply services/components to weapons corporations that supply weapons to Israel.
A corporation management might not have a conscience but plenty of workers do, and approaching them through their trade union or labor organization might open opportunities to discuss possible ways they can noncooperate with the genocide and occupation.
(16) To cause vessels and cargo planes engaged in transporting goods and weapons to or from Israel to cease doing so [temporarily/permanently].
Beyond that, however, and given that most governments won’t do this, activists working in conjunction with local trade unions can do it too. For example, starting in the late 1980s in Australia, the combined efforts of nonviolent activists and trade unionists caused significant delays in the unloading of imported rainforest timber from cargo ships. The awareness generated by these widely publicized and graphic actions was used to mobilize a massive boycott of imported rainforest timber by the Australian community, effectively eliminating the trade within three years as entire industries switched to sourcing timber from more sustainable sources. Watch ‘Time to Act’ and see ‘Nonviolent Struggle for the Rainforests’.
Of course, trade union action of this nature has a long history. For example, during the apartheid era in South Africa, Danish dock workers in 1963 decided not to unload ships carrying South African products, triggering a similar boycott in Sweden, England and elsewhere.
In relation to Palestine, the first solidarity action of this nature occurred in South Africa when the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) decided not to unload an Israeli ship due to arrive in Durban on 8 February 2009. See ‘The BNC Salutes South African Dock Workers Action!’
And in 2014, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in the United States launched Block the Boat in response to the call by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) and a coalition of all major Palestinian workers unions and professional associations who called on their fellow trade unionists and workers worldwide to boycott Israel and businesses that are complicit with its apartheid regime. They specifically urged a refusal to handle Israeli goods and support for union members refusing to build Israeli weapons.
Analysing the ten-year history of ‘Block the Boat’ actions in various countries, researchers Rafeef Ziadah and Katy Fox-Hodess identified some crucial variables worth addressing to make these nonviolent actions have maximum impact. Critically, this included thinking carefully about how activists could most effectively get involved in working with unions and how activists can take some of the more extreme pressures off workers, particularly when sanctions for taking solidarity action are onerous. See ‘Dockworkers and Labor Activists Can Block the Transport of Arms to Israel’.
Workers in Palestine has recently posted a video of nonviolent actions undertaken around the world to shut down weapons factories and disrupt weapons shipments to Israel in response to the genocide in Gaza.
If nonviolent actions of this nature in solidarity with Palestine appeal to you and other activists in your local port, you can identify the arrival of Israel’s ZIM vessels on their port schedule – see ZIM vessels Port schedule – and track their vessels on either Marine Traffic or Vessel Finder.
(17) To cause consumers, including members of religious, service, sporting, business and other community organizations,to boycott those products produced by companies taking advantage of the Israeli occupation economy in Palestine.
As the BDS Movement points out, it is superior strategy for people to focus their efforts on certain companies prioritized for targeting (because of their deep complicity in the occupation) rather than dissipate effort so widely that little impact is felt anywhere. See ‘BDS Guide to Strategic Campaigning for Palestinian Rights’.
But if you want more comprehensive lists to view other companies you can boycott, the Who Profits Research Center has compiled a list of companies to boycott because they profit from the Israeli occupation economy.
The American Friends Service Committee has also compiled a list of companies, with two sectors additional to the ‘Who Profits’ list above. See ‘Investigate: What are you invested in?’
Another simple option is to sign the ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ letter to Google and Amazon for providing ‘cloud technology to the Israeli government and military… to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land’. But boycotting Google and Amazon is a far more powerful option given they are spying on you too as part of their role in advancing the Elite’s technocracy.
(18) To cause the individual and organizational investors(including religious and sporting bodies) of banks,asset managers, insurance companies and pension funds in Israel and elsewhere to shift their money to ethical banks and credit unions, asset managers, insurance companies and pension funds that do not finance, invest in or are otherwise involved in supplying banking, asset management, insurance or pension services toIsrael (and Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine) or to weapons corporations that supply weapons to Israel.
The BDS Movement specifically encourages divestment from the French multinational insurance giant AXA ‘for its investments in Israeli banks [with Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, First International Bank of Israel, Israel Discount Bank, Mizrahi Tefahot Bank being the main five], which are deeply complicit in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise on occupied Palestinian land’. See ‘AXA Divest’.
If you live outside Europe or an organization is not listed and you are in doubt, the general principle is to always seek those (invariably smaller) institutions that identify as ‘ethical’ and investigate these to see if they deserve your patronage.
As an aside, if your knowledge of the management (or membership) of a financial institution with which you deal suggests they might be willing to divest from Israel (or weapons corporations) without significant public engagement first, it may be worth your while to approach them to find out. Obviously, you do not need to boycott or organize a wider boycott of an institution that is responsive to dialogue.
(19) To cause SpaceX, which manufactures and deploys Starlink spy satellites to facilitate genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine generally, to cease doing so.
One way in which pressure can be exerted is by mobilizing people, wherever they live, to boycott the Starlink service (and switch to another provider) in their area. Another less direct way is to boycott X (formerly Twitter) because it is also owned by Elon Musk (who owns SpaceX).
Summary
Not all of the strategic goals nominated above will need to be achieved for the strategy to be successful but each goal is focused in such a way that its achievement will functionally undermine the power of those conducting the genocide and the occupation.
And if we are to defeat the Elite technocracy being imposed on the entire human population, with Palestine (in both the West Bank and Gaza) being used as the testing ground and incubator of so many of the technologies that will be used to kill or enslave us all, then we must resist strategically, as explained in the campaign of ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ with one-page flyers, identifying the simplest version of the strategy, available in 23 languages.
Conclusion
The people of Palestine have the same choice we all face in relation to the Elite’s rapidly advancing technocracy.
We can do nothing, we can complain (by lobbying and petitioning governments or international organizations), we can sign public declarations, we can turn up at demonstrations, and do all of the other things that put the power to change things in the hands of others. And watch this come to nought.
According to Dr Anis Sayigh, Palestinian intellectual and chairman of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut until it was destroyed by Israel in 1983, in 1936 the Palestinians were convinced by Arab leaders in the region to end a nonviolent general strike to give Britain a chance to prove its ‘good intentions’. Dr Sayigh goes on to state: ‘Unfortunately, to this day, we are still discussing UN resolutions and American and European initiatives to give the West a chance to prove its good intentions.’ Watch episode 2 of ‘Al-Nabka: The Palestinian catastrophe – Episodes 1-4’.
The point is simple: Until we learn that the Elite and its agents – no matter who or where they are: western, Arabic, Israeli, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, international organization, corporation, NGO, philanthropic foundation…. – will never change a system from which they benefit enormously by exploiting us, we will continue to run the treadmill of defeat whatever the cause for which we fight.
So we have a choice: Keep doing what history clearly demonstrates does not work or plan and take strategically-focused action that makes a difference ourselves.
That choice is yours whether we are fighting to defend Palestinians in Gaza from the ongoing genocide, liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation or defend humanity from the rapidly advancing technocracy.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
Western civilization is characterized by its institutions. Its foundations have been government, organized religion, the military, science, technology, business, academia, media, art, and entertainment. Institutions have been bulwarks of order and have enabled Western civilization to reach unprecedented plateaus of achievement and prosperity. Now, they’re under assault and crumbling, which has been often noted and decried but usually not analyzed or understood as the outcome of an epochal transition.
Institutions have been the victim of their own success. The Industrial and Information Revolutions have put goods, services, wealth, data, and choices in billions of hands in what amounts to an historical blink of an eye, less than two centuries. The average American lives better and longer than royalty did back in monarchy’s heyday and has more personal power. Kings and emperors of yore could order people around and toss them in dungeons, but they couldn’t hop on the Internet and communicate with someone on the other side of the planet or hop on a freeway and journey five hundred miles in a day.
Institutions’ loss has been individuals’ gain, and many of the latter are questioning the necessity of the former. Institutions are staring into an abyss. Many, including governments, do not have convincing justifications for their own existence. They offer little to average people and in many cases they’re a net negative, imposing nothing but burdens. Their leaders are solely devoted to furthering their own prerogatives and power. Now, institutions are fighting a rearguard action to halt or slow a transition that at best will dramatically reduce their power and could mean their extinction.
COVID, climate change, foreign wars, censorship, woke, open borders, surveillance, and digital passports and currencies are Last Gasp efforts to preserve institutional status, wealth, and power. The institutions have responded to their own drum roll with what vigor they can muster, but those causes inspire vapid virtue signaling, not authentic passion. Their only wellspring of true passion is hatred for anyone who believes differently, who challenges their science, propaganda, and mendacity, and, more broadly, their right to dictate and coerce, and to cancel, punish or execute anyone not toeing their line.
Their objective failures—many of which count in their corrupt reckonings as successes—are manifest. The COVID response, particularly vaccines’ deaths and adverse events, completely discredited governments, public health, institutional medicine, the pharmaceutical companies, and social and mainstream media, while inflicting severe collateral damage on official “science,” big business, and central banks. The institutions are regrouping under the banner of climate change, but it’s clear from the pushback they’re already receiving that their agenda can only be implemented through violence and high-tech totalitarianism.
Repeated failures and ever-mounting resistance would seem to be enough to doom their totalitarian designs. Unfortunately, in their desperation and hatred, the willingness of the elite to wage actual, kinetic war on the rest of us shouldn’t be underestimated. While the COVID vaccine death toll numbers in the millions, war still has no rival for murderous effectiveness. However, offensive violence is no solution.
Nuclear weapons changed warfare in a way that’s not generally recognized. The threat that a global nuclear conflagration could eliminate humanity rendered their use a high-risk proposition. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945 remain the only wartime use of nuclear weapons. Under the umbrella created by nuclear weapons’ unemployability, technological advances have fueled the development of a staggering array of armaments that has decisively shifted the military balance from offensive to defensive warfare.
World War II was the last major war in which an offensive, or, more correctly, a counter-offensive, won. The allied powers repelled the axis powers, but at huge cost. Industrial-scale, mechanized warfare’s awesome destructive power left all the major participants except the U.S. in ruins, their populations decimated.
Offensive military power has become enormously expensive relative to the defensive technologies and strategies that can be employed against it. Since World War II, there have been few successful invasions. Both sides were stymied in the Korean War. U.S. invasions have been a string of disasters since Vietnam. Afghan goat herders defeated both the Soviets and the U.S.
On the cusp of victory in Ukraine, the Russian Special Military Operation would seem to belie the trend of offensive failures. However, the Russians have actually won by playing defense. They moved through their major objective, the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine, where the majority of the population speak Russian. Many of them want to be part of Russia and hate the Ukrainian government, which has waged war on them since the 2014 coup. Consequently, the Russians were supported by the local population.
This past year featured a Ukrainian counteroffensive that was supposed to drive the Russians back from Donbass and retake the Crimean peninsula. NATO and Ukrainian strategists refused to recognize that their offensive was akin to sending cavalry units against machine-gun and artillery emplacements. They were up against an opponent well-armed with land mines, state-of-the-art field artillery and long-range missiles, air cover, and surveillance and attack drones. The Russian military, which has a long tradition of waging defensive warfare, employed a complex three-layer defense. The Ukrainians rarely progressed through even the first layer, impaling themselves on the tip of the Russian spear and taking massive losses.
The successful Russian strategies and tactics will be, or should be, studied by military analysts in the U.S. However, what’s most important is that those tactics implicitly acknowledge a truism central to the transition in progress. High-cost offensive warfare can be stymied and often defeated with relatively low-cost defensive weaponry and asymmetric warfare.
It can be argued that an offensive against the world’s most powerful military was obviously doomed, although nobody in the Western brain trust made that argument before the Ukrainians attacked. What truly signals the dawning of a new age have been the repeated successes since World War II of guerrilla or insurgent warfare against ostensibly much more powerful forces.
The Russians learned their lesson from the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. The U.S. government hasn’t learned anything from its string of failures. In Washington, nothing succeeds like failure. Its unconditional backing of Israel’s attempted elimination of Palestinians in Gaza finds it doubling down on what hasn’t worked.
The Israelis recognize a grim reality of fighting an insurgency on insurgent territory: To win, it’s not enough to kill the guerrillas; the guerrilla-friendly local population must be eliminated as well. The Israelis’ campaign has been merciless: destroying structures, killing Palestinian civilians, and making life intolerable for the survivors. The Israeli aim is to drive the Palestinians from Gaza and Israel for good. This meets international-law definitions of genocide and has been rightly decried around the world.
What will it mean if Israel fails? The Israelis may well reduce Gaza to rubble, but that would not be mission accomplished. Rubble provides excellent cover for guerrilla strikes. Hamas’ extensive tunnels indicate that it has prepared for this war for years. In all probability, it launched the October 7 attack to get things going. Israel’s negligence detecting and responding to that attack may have been intentional, indicating that it, too, wanted the war it now has.
Hamas has a network of allies across the Middle East. Israeli and U.S. forces and maritime commerce are under attack in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. Yemen’s Houthis have already bottled up the Red Sea. It would be an easy matter for Iran to do the same in the Persian Gulf. Control of maritime commerce at important choke points calls into question a plank as central to the American Empire as it was to the British Empire before it: control of the world’s seas and oceans.
What happens if an American-led flotilla tasked with keeping the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf open comes under a swarming missile and drone attack, plus electronic warfare that disrupts its command and control capabilities, and destroyers or aircraft carriers are sunk? Missiles, drones, and cyber disruption cost a pittance compared to battleships, and it would then be apparent that they make conventional surface naval power a paper shark. The vessels in their watery grave would send the same message as the tanks smoldering on Ukraine’s battlefields.
The power of governments rests on their ability to use violence to control populations. Yawning cost disparities, decentralized technologies, and asymmetric warfare have rendered much of conventional offensive power vulnerable or obsolete, marking an historic, tectonic transition in the relationships between governments and governed. This is no secret, particularly in the non-Western world.
Across the globe, insurgents are taking the measure of governments and finding them wanting. Governments that are not feared cannot govern. As they confront their limitations, they will, being governments, make their situations worse.
The American government has a problem not shared by many others. Its potential insurgents—urban, suburban, and rural—are armed to the teeth. They already control many of the cities (see “Ants at the Picnic, Part Two”). Heavily indebted Washington cannot command the resources necessary to subjugate the population. It gets stretched thinner with each new dollar of debt, each new tax, each new institutionalized corruption, each new illegal migrant, each new substitution of gobbledygook ideology for rationality, and each new foreign intervention. Recognition of Washington’s weakness is behind the talk of secession and some states’ defiance of its dictates.
Washington’s weakness is shared by many Western governments, although most of them don’t have to contend with armed opposition. They do have to contend with increasingly restive populations, which by sheer force of numbers can upend existing political arrangements. It is delusional to think that these beleaguered national governments can be replaced by a confederated or unitary global government that could then exercise effective control.
The imposition of global government would entail an invasion by an outside force of millions of globally dispersed localities. The global force would encounter the same problem Israel faces in Gaza. Overt and covert opposition could number in the billions.
The globalists would have to contend with organized insurrection, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and terrorism, as well as random riots, criminality, and widespread disorder. They would have to resort to the Israeli “solution” in Gaza—mass extermination. While they are relying on propaganda, subversion, electronic control, and biological warfare, perhaps only nuclear weapons could achieve genocide at the necessary scale. Don’t put it past them. Don’t put it past the insurgents to acquire their own nukes.
Short of nuclear conflagration, the world will continue to devolve towards institutional failure, popular disillusionment, mounting rage, and chaotic fragmentation and balkanization. Today’s dinosaur governments are unable to exercise control, and many of them are slated for extinction. They will not be replaced by an even larger and more unwieldy dinosaur—global government—which is only the last, desperate hope of the fading regime. Instead, the vacuum created by failed governments will be filled by those proficient in decentralized violence. Those who have relied on centralized authority for their livelihoods, power, and status will find their worlds turned upside down. Many will not survive the transition.
Figure One: Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern.
Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same?
Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back…and watch…and let them destroy themselves. — “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Twilight Zone
Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?
All the signs seem to point in this direction.
For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.
Why is the Deep State engineering this societal madness? What’s in it for the government?
What is playing out before us is a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps the populace fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of standing united in defense of our freedoms.
It’s not conspiratorial.
It’s a power play.
Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, understood the dynamics behind this power play.
In the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling imagined a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.
It doesn’t take long at all.
Likewise, in Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s studio), unexplained crises lead to a technological blackout that leaves the populace disconnected, disoriented, isolated, suspicious, and under attack from mysterious ailments and each other.
As one of Leave the World’s characters speculates, the culprit behind the escalating catastrophes, which range from WiFi outages and mysterious health ailments to cities under siege from rogue forces, may be the result of a military campaign intended to destabilize a nation by forcing people to turn against each other.
It’s really not so far-flung a scenario when you consider some of the many ways the government already has the ability to manufacture crises in order to sow fear, fuel hysteria, destabilize the nation and institute martial law.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture health crises. Long before COVID-19 locked down the nation, the U.S. government was creating lethal viruses and unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture civil unrest and political upheaval. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been using agent provocateurs to infiltrate activist groups in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” them.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture economic instability. As the national debt continues to rise upwards of $34 trillion, with little attempt by federal agencies to curtail spending, it stands as the single-most pressing threat to the economy.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture environmental disasters. Deployed in 1947, Project Cirrus, an early precursor to HAARP, the government’s weather-altering agency, attempted to disable a hurricane as it was moving out to sea. Instead of weakening the storm, however, the government steered it straight into Georgia, resulting in millions of dollars in damaged properties.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture communications blackouts. Internet and cell phone kill switches enable the government to shut down communications at a moment’s notice. It’s a practice that has been used before in the U.S. In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels (reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone). In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked (again, same rationale). And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down (this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man).
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture terrorist attacks. Indeed, the FBI has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.
We must never forget that the government no longer exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.
Rather, “we the people” are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.
Think about it: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, trap and control us.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms.
We’re in a similar escapist bubble, suffering from a “crisis of the now,” which keeps us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.
Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.
“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”
Yet in addition to being distracted by our electronic devices and diverted by bread-and-circus entertainment spectacles, we are also being polarized by political theater, which aims to keep us divided and at war with each other.
This is the underlying cautionary tale of Leave the World Behind and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control.
A popular meme circulating a while back described it this way:
“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?”
The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.
It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. For them, it’s a win-win situation.
Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.
They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.
The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.
This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations’ needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.
In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-COVID world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.
There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.
That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues — prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India — stated the following about the book:
This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.”
‘Sickening Profits’ continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?
After the Crash 