Scumbags

 

I started this post in late-January.  Then stuff happened.  I'm posting it now because the overall observation remains valid.  The thesis is this: The various geo-political struggles going on today are often just conflicts between different sets of scumbags.  It is up to ordinary folks to do their best to objectively look at each conflict and decide what the facts are and how the victory of one side or the other will best weaken the more dangerous party.  Generally speaking, NONE of these actors are on our side and therefore we should NOT see ourselves as being part of any team.

Now, I'm not saying that I genuinely believed the Biden administration when anyone within it claimed they were deeply troubled by the slaughter of the Palestinians as they continued to send weapons to the Israelis who are doing the slaughtering.  I don't believe that for a second.  But I was of the opinion that this slaughter is Netanyahu's doing.  That Netanyahu orchestrated this crisis and that the USA is going along with it because Israel is a strategically important ally and people scumbags like Biden go along with stuff like this from time-to-time for the sake of convenience.  Like, it's not really all that important to Biden one way or another if 500,000 Palestinians die, or 500,000 Ukrainians, 40,000 Venezuelans, or 45,000 US-Americans per year for over a decade, or 1,000,000 Iraqis, or 4.5 million (mostly Arabs) in the USA's GBWT. [There is no link for the 500,000 Palestinians because at present the actual death-toll is estimated at 30,000, with the rest of that number being potential deaths from disease and starvation under present conditions.  There is no link for the 500,000 Ukrainians because our corporate-imperialist mainstream media (including Google) are absolutely terrible.  They post garbage like 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed to 500,000 Russian soldiers killed.  Absolute propaganda garbage.]

But anyway, my point was that Biden didn't instigate this but he doesn't really care.  His administration's empty words about "urging restraint" or whatever are just for public consumption.  Of course Biden could cut-off the weapons, but there would be at least a domestic political price to pay for that.  The Republicans once invited Netanyahu to Washington to speak to Congress and condemn Obama's proposed treaty with Iran.  I am not one of those people who believes that Israel (by which those sorts of people mean "The Jews") owns and runs the USA.  But I am someone who disputes the notion that all a US president has to do is pick up the phone and an Israeli PM will instantly follow orders which is how Noam Chomsky (for instance) occasionally describes the relationship.

I believe this nightmare is Netanyahu's and, going against my usual thinking, I believe he conspired with others to bring it about.  My thinking follows the line of argument from this comment from this Open Thread from Moon of Alabama:

After Izzzy intelligence obtained Hamas' detailed plan for Oct 7th they analyzed it.

Important for analysis would be continuous monitoring of whether the reality on the ground - Hamas' current activities - matched the detailed plans.

So that is what they did. Unit 8200 "the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps" made the decision to stand-down and cease the real-time monitoring of the tactical communication of Hamas operatives on their radios.

Wait! Did I really mean "stand-down and cease monitoring"? They instead increased their diligence in monitoring. Right?

Nope. Unit 8200 claims that everyone up and down the military/intelligence chain of command approved the ceasing of monitoring.

So what is going on here?

It couldn't be a false-flag in progress as there are thousands of IDF troops surrounding the Gaza border, a false-flag could never work. Oh, there **were** thousands of troops until just before Oct 7th when they withdrew for temporary duty in the West Bank.

But a false-flag still wouldn't work. Hamas could be dispelled by the quick arrival of support troops.

Oh no, the troops didn't arrive in force for hours. What gives?

Still, a false-flag doesn't make sense unless there is a purpose. What good would the death of Izzzy civlians do? Oh, but it created blood lust which was then harnessed to "justify" the cleansing of Gaza and subsequently, the West Bank.

But, there would be no blood lust if the casualties were light. The Hannibal Directive wasn't implemented for that purpose was it? They didn't implement the Hannibal Directive for ulterior motives?

Or did they?

I mean, occasionally someone will say something about what FDR knew about the Japanese armada heading towards Pearl Harbour.  But at the end of the day, would Roosevelt really allow the US Pacific fleet to be crippled like that?  Personally, I doubt it.  Same with 9-11.  In that case, I personally believe that bush II and Cheney intentionally slowed all the institutional efforts to monitor things, but that the "inside job" theory is nonsensical due to the hundreds of actors required to keep silent and who would supposedly have stayed silent for 23 years.  Sometimes it's just like it was with Stalin being warned about Hitler attacking the USSR: Stalin received numerous warnings of an impending attack that turned out to have been false.  He believed that Churchill's warnings in particular were false and were intended to provoke a Soviet-German war to take the pressure off of Britain.  All of those false alarms reinforced his belief that Hitler would never invade the USSR until he had his western flank secured.  In this case, nobody accuses Stalin of having allowed Hitler's invasion.  Instead they accuse Stalin of gross incompetence.  The reality is that while Stalin might have been too personally invested in his own theory, which turned out wrong, he wasn't completely irrational.

But in the case of the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023, we have Israeli intelligence, Egyptian intelligence, even (according to Biden) US intelligence, warning the Israelis and speaking out about it and it just seems to me that the racist psychopath Netanyahu wanted this to happen this way.  Just as him and his propagandists are unashamed to concoct lies about forty beheaded Israeli babies, or Hamas fighters gang-raping an Israeli woman and then playing an impromptu game of soccer with one of her severed breasts during a military raid, ... stupid claims that have since been debunked, Netanyahu was willing and able to murder hundreds of Israelis to create a measure of bloodlust in Israeli society that would allow him to pursue this genocide for his own narcissistic purposes.

But this interview between Danny Haiphong and Michael Hudson has Hudson asserting that this is very much Biden's war and it is part of his adminstration's insane desire to start a war with Iran and thereby re-establish US dominance over the Middle East.  (Hudson argues, as many others have, that this purely military solution is a symptom of the declining power of the USA diplomatically, economically and culturally.):

The fact is that the rest of the world not only finds America unnecessary, but America and its NATO allies to be the major threat to their own prosperity. So they’re essentially splitting into their own world. And the BRICS group is expanding its trade relations, its investment relations, and especially its financial clearing and monetary operations to be independent of the dollar, de-dollarizing, and certainly independent of the euro, which seems to have no visible means of support right now, and going their own way. 

Now, that is exactly what has led the United States to push Israel [essentially] to follow Netanyahu’s belligerence, because the United States says, We realize we’re losing power. 

We know that it’s really not a stalemate. We know that we’ve lost the chance for world dominance. We may be re-elected by telling people, you know, it doesn’t really matter. 

But we know that it does matter. The last chance we have to assert American power is military. And the main military prize is the Near East now, just as it was after 9-11, when Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld pressed for an invasion of Iraq to begin grabbing its soil and to essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda Iraq. So now America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East, the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the Israelis. The plan is—and America is willing to fight to the last Israeli, just as it’s willing—it’s trying to fight to the last Ukrainian in order to make this final grab of the Near East in fighting Iran. 

This is a crazy idea, but it seems that that’s exactly what is being planned. 

General Petraeus, who lost the war in Afghanistan, has said, we’ve got to conquer Iran. That’s going to be—we can regain all the power that we’ve lost by attacking Iran. And so now it looks like President Biden is hoping to make a political comeback by saying, Well, we may not have blocked Russia and Ukraine, but at least we’ve conquered the Near East. 

Notice that in neither of these scenarios do Biden or Netanyahu come off as innocent.  No. Whatever the truth is, they're both scumbags.  And what we have to understand is that we're living in a world dominated by scumbags.  Since Biden, the Deep State, and the US imperialist oligarchy are scumbags, it is somewhat gratifying to see their efforts to maintain animosity between Saudi Arabia and Iran begin to fail as (with the mediation of China) both countries come to some sort of diplomatic understanding.

But Saudi Arabia is run by a horrible, HORRIBLE ruling class, and Mohammed bin Salman (its de facto ruler) is a horrible person in particular.  And the government of Iran is horrible.  And, I'd probably have to say the same about the government of China, although I don't pay attention to the news much because they're full of ridiculous propaganda.  I'm not sure what the truth is about China's treatment of the Uyghurs, or human rights in general, but I'll go out on a limb and say that the Communist Party of China, while less bellicose and more meritocratic than the corrupt, decayed US oligarchy, are probably cold-blooded, amoral psychopaths.

We have to understand that we are observing contests between psychopathic scumbags.  When Iranian women protest against their oppression by their misogynist government we should wish them well.  But we should also realize that any assistance/publicity given to them by the US government/media system is calculated.  We should also acknowledge that the USA might have some involvement in at least some of these protests.  We should acknowledge that any US-backed alternative to the current Iranian ruling class will be scumbags serving US scumbag monstrous agendas.  Given these facts, we should only hope that the Iranian people whose values we share, fight against their own government, whose values we oppose, in their own way without the interference of the cynical, hypocritical, duplicitous, USA ruling elite.

When we see the USA's hegemony unravelling in the Middle East, with China brokering a truce between Saudi Arabia and Iran we should celebrate it.  Because the Sunni-Shia rivalry has been ruinous for ordinary Muslims (and ordinary non-Muslims) in that part of the world.  Because the USA is exploiting this rivalry to punish Iran for its revolution in 1979 which expelled US influence from the country and humiliated the USA with the hostage crisis (the US leadership is inordinately thin-skinned and holds grudges seemingly forever).

The weaker the international hegemony of the USA, the more possible it is for there to be openings for ordinary people.  Look at what the USA's ruling class does to its own people!  Look at their incarceration rate!  Look at their healthcare bankruptcies!  Look at their infant mortality figures!

Through the orchestrated creation of a global oligarchic order (the seemingly as natural as the ocean currents process of "globalization") the USA has constructed an international order bent on exporting this rancid system to every corner of the globe.  I submit that NATIONAL economies, controlled by NATIONAL capitalists, served by politicians beholden to those domestic capitalists, will be easier to confront and challenge than politicians and capitalists with the whole weight of the world behind them.  

Think about it!  THEY can relocate anywhere they want to if a government tries to regulate them against their will.  They have constructed international restrictions on the powers of national governments that have eliminated the abilities of those governments to limit corporations' freedom to pollute the environment or to allow those governments to protect vital industries.

Furthermore, the weakening of the USA's global hegemony would make the world more peaceful.  The USA couldn't have done something like the invasion of Iraq during the Cold War.  Look at what a charnel house it has made of the Middle East since the 1990's.

I could start typing about NATO vs. Russia.  But I've written enough posts on this blog that if you read it you already know what I think.  If you're new here, just browse around on the topic and you'll find out.  But with regards to this post, ... yeah, I think Putin is a scumbag.  But he was provoked into this war.  The USA's ruling elite wants either a Russia so weak as to be docile, and perhaps even weak enough to be raped with impunity, or it wants to break Russia up into weaker states that can definitely be raped with impunity.  The Biden administration continued the Obama-Clinton policy of working with shit-head nazis to attack Russia until Putin said enough's enough.  In this particular contest of scumbags, NATO is the more dangerous party and it is the aggressor.

Oh yeah.  I just remembered that last night I dreamed that Donald Rumsfeld was working in a college cafeteria.  I think he was volunteering.  In the dream it didn't surprise me that he was still alive because I forgot that he died a few years ago.