It is all a part of the same phenomenon. Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right-wing parties and fuelled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.
It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in Western philosophy.
This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy. Therefore this philosophy does not really have its equivalent of Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, whose careful exposition of societal analysis and ideals, based on a comprehensive understanding of previous philosophical discourse, is being superseded.
If there is a current equivalent we may look at Bernard Henri Levy, whose rejection of collectivism and support of individual rights moved ever rightwards into support of raw capitalism, invasions of Muslim countries and now outspoken support for the genocide in Gaza. If you want to find an embodiment of the shift in Western philosophy, it might be him. But few any longer pay attention to academic intellectuals sitting in their studies. The now-threadbare mantle of “public intellectual” in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.
Part of this is institutional. In my youth, Bertrand Russell or AJP Taylor were quite likely to turn up giving serious talks on the BBC, and John Pilger was the most celebrated documentary maker in British media. But now left-wing voices are effectively banned from mainstream media, whilst left-wing academics are most unlikely to progress in academia. Academia is itself now entirely run on a corporate model in the UK as throughout all the West.
A young Noam Chomsky would almost certainly be told by the University authorities to stick to linguistics and leave aside the philosophy and politics, or not get tenure. Chomsky was already a renowned linguist in 1967, when he published his breakthrough essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Essentially a call for academics to support the protest movement, a young professor who published it today would almost certainly get suspended if not sacked and even, in today’s climate, quite possibly arrested.
The deportations of students from the USA who have broken no law but protested against genocide; the fines there on universities for allowing free speech; the deportations of EU citizens from Germany for speaking out on Palestine; the police raid on the Quaker meeting house in London and the widespread “terrorism” charges against peaceful journalists – these are just examples of a wave of repression sweeping the major Western states.
They are all linked. It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930s.
The great irony of course is that it is the Western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Western destabilisation of Syria that led to the massive wave of immigration to Europe that caused the rise of the far right. Over 1.5 million Syrian “refugees” were granted asylum in the EU, because they claimed to be on the anti-Assad side, which the West was supporting. AfD is very much a result of Merkel’s decision to accept 600,000 Syrian refugees in Germany.
Fascinatingly, now their side has “won” and a Western-backed government been installed in Damascus, less than 1% of these refugees have returned to Syria. Despite the official anti-immigrant narratives of almost all Western governments, there seems to be no attempt to suggest that they might return. Indeed, those Western politicians most keen on deporting immigrants are the least likely to suggest that the reliably Zionist anti-Assad Syrians should leave, even though those same politicians portray Syria under al Jolani as a liberal paradise and rush to give it money.
The neo-con immigration narrative in Europe is peculiarly complex and flexible. Effectively immigrants viewed as on the West’s side in its wars (Sunni Syrians, Ukrainians) have an open door.
Mass immigration to Europe is therefore a direct result of imperialist foreign policy, and that plays out in complex ways, with the West’s victims arriving against official disapproval and the West’s clients arriving with official approval.
Equally, the economic dislocation and large rise in inflation which also has strengthened the populist right, is itself exaggerated by Western foreign policy. The proxy war in Ukraine is largely responsible for the step change in Europe’s energy prices, with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline a key factor in the major struggles of German manufacturing industry.
Incredibly, for a year the entire Western media and political class tried to enforce the lie that Russia destroyed its own pipeline – just as they claimed Hamas blew up the first of the dozens of hospitals and health centres destroyed by Israel.
We come back to Gaza, as all serious discussion must at present. I cannot come to terms with the fact that the takeover of the political Establishment by Zionist interests – itself a consequence of the massive growth of the comparative wealth of the ultra-rich – is making it possible for the most brutal genocide possible to happen before the eyes of the world, with active support from the Western establishment.
It is not that the people do not want to stop it. It is that there is no mechanism connecting the popular will to the instruments of government. The major parties all support Israel’s genocide in almost all the Western “democracies”.
It has become impossible to deny the intention of Genocide now. Israel has stepped up its killing of children to dozens every day, is openly executing medics and destroying all healthcare facilities, is bombing desalination plants and is blockading all food.
The Zionist narrative on social media has shifted from denial of genocide to justification of genocide.
I simply cannot understand the mainstream tolerance of this Holocaust. I am living in an age where the power structures and social narratives I do not recognise as part of a societal organisation to which I can consent to belong. It is the British Labour Party which is actively supporting genocide whilst targeting the most vulnerable at home for cuts in income. It is the EU which is doing everything possible to promote World War 3 and transforming into a militarily aggressive organisation of Nazi leanings.
Still, it’s not all bad news.
Israel’s genocidal President Isaac Herzog welcomed Ruth Smeeth, Louise Ellman, Christian Wakeford and Margaret Hodge with open arms.
Look at Margaret’s face. She was having the time of her life. Bless her.
Who says genocide has to be depressing? https://t.co/jphoeDu8SV pic.twitter.com/AnX0JhrqtY
— Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇱🇧🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) April 6, 2025
The UK, US and other first world nations are radically cutting overseas aid to provide money for imperialist military aggression. The broadly social democratic consensus of the Western world in my youth involved much dull compromise: but it was infinitely better and more hopeful than this Hell we are creating.
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German policy has its roots in “Holocaust guilt”. The German state of the first half of the 1940s murdered 6 million Jews. The current German state seeks to atone for that crime by helping the Jewish state to a holocaust of Its own. If things continue, will it be a Final Solution of its own -at expense of the Palestinians?
Modern German Democrats like Konrad Adenauer and Willi Brandt must be turning in their graves
I was checking my email earlier and, as such, came across one from Labour Outlook with an article by Diane Abbott entitled ‘Welfare not warfare must be our banner’ (originally posted on CNDs website), in which she says:
This is not a discussion confined to activists and policy wonks. At least two national newspapers have made the link, with one splashing on its front page that the government is creating a warfare state.
So at that point I did a search to see if could find the articles AND the two national newspapers she’s referring to (at a guess, I assume it’s probably the Guardian and the Independent, or perhaps the i), and in the process came across this piece from 1985. I’ve only read the first couple of pages so far, but here’s the title and a clip from it:
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime
Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence. They claim that the prices they charge barely cover the costs of protection. They call people who complain about the price of protection “anarchists,” “subversives,” or both at once. But consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction. Governments’ provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers.
https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/19sd/refs/Tilly1985.pdf
Yes, precisely, and that is exactly what the Starmerfuhrer and the establishment and their media chums have been laying on us for much of the past three years… since they and the US et al provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, and progressively ratcheting it up, and are now of course doing all they can – the European element that is – to sabotage a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.
Anyway, I then thought I’d check out CNDs website, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before (but I could be wrong), and came across the following (relatively short) piece, posted on March 26th entitled ‘Spring Budget is all about war and austerity’:
Whilst the government says the spring budget is about security and renewal, in reality it is about doubling down on failed and dangerous policies of war and austerity. The budget will make the population poorer, particularly the most vulnerable in our society. It will fail to keep us secure, instead dragging us towards greater threats of war and the catastrophic use of nuclear weapons…
https://cnduk.org/spring-budget-is-all-about-war-and-austerity/
I then came onto Craig’s website to find that he’d just posted a new article…
I happened to be on amazon earlier (yesterday) checking out a book someone referred to in an article on Counterpunch, and that in turn led to me coming across a relatively new book about the USS Liberty. I read the original book about the episode about ten years ago, but in coming across the book and, as such, being reminded of the episode, it occured to me that it sums up and encapsulates and exemplfies Israel and the US for what they are, and is incontrovertable proof of how totally evil they are. Yes, WE all know it – ie those of us who follow Craig et al (the truepers), but as with this latest atrocity by Israel, they lie and fabricate so as to try and dupe and deceive the masses, and in this particular instance, given the video footage that’s now come to light, the MSM in the main appear to be going with the absurd response by Israel that the IDF ‘made mistakes’… but, there were Hamas fighters amongst the paramedics and responders, so that justified it, many of the MSM saying in their headline – in respect of the video – that ‘it appears to contradict’ the IDF version of events. Er, no, it *DOES* contradict the IDFs version of events, and there were no Hamas fighters amongst the crews of course, and Israel was lying though it nasty rotten psychopathic sadistic murdering teeth again, and you damn well know it.
“Bernard” Russell?
Sorry had just been writing about Bernard Levy!
I just went out to smoke a roll-up before crashing out, and I recalled something Jonathan Cook said in an article. I went on to his website late yesterday evening to see if he’d posted an article about the video footage that recently came to light. But there was nothing, so I then did a general search and, as such, came across the following article posted today on a website called Evening Report nz. It’s pretty long, and I imagine it must have taken him a couple of days to put it together, the point being that he doesn’t mention the video footage (although I imagine he will be posting an article about it shortly), but he says this in relation to the murder of the paramedics and responders, and the claim by the IDF that there were Hamas fighters among them:
But as news of the atrocity started to appear on social media last week, and the mass grave was unearthed on Sunday, Israel was forced to concoct a cover story.
It claimed the convoy of five ambulances, a fire engine, and a UN vehicle were “advancing suspiciously” towards Israeli soldiers. It also insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the vehicles had been harbouring Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Once again, we were supposed to accept not only an improbable Israeli claim but an entirely nonsensical one. Why would Hamas fighters choose to become sitting ducks by hiding in the diminishing number of emergency vehicles still operating in Gaza?
Why would they approach an Israeli military position out in the open, where they were easy prey, rather than fighting their enemy from the shadows, like other guerrilla armies — using Gaza’s extensive concrete ruins and their underground tunnels as cover?
If the ambulance crews were killed in the middle of a firefight, why were some victims exhumed with their hands tied? How is it possible that they were all killed in a gun battle when the soldiers could be heard calling for the survivors to be zip-tied?
And if Israel was really the wronged party, why did it seek to hide the bodies and the crushed vehicles under sand?
The graver Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the quieter the BBC grows
https://eveningreport.nz/2025/04/07/the-graver-israels-atrocities-in-gaza-the-quieter-the-bbc-grows/
Bertrand Russell was a posh plonker who when he thought the USSR hadn’t yet got nuclear weapons advocated bombing that country with US nuclear weapons for “peace”. Did the philosopher ever say he’d been wrong to take that line? I know he changed it, but that’s not the question.
Sure he was kicked off Trinity College’s high table back in the day, but he snivelled his way back to it when they asked him back. What a creep. If he couldn’t say smash Trinity College, we’re not talking about someone who was opposed to the ruling class.
Credit to him for opposing WW1 and also for opposing the US effort in Vietnam, but many did. Sorry but it doesn’t make his effort more valuable than anyone else’s just because he was posh.
But look what he did in between WW1 and Vietnam – he supported WW2, in which more people were slaughtered than in WW1 and Vietnam put together.
The Committee of 100 was cool too. Few are aware even today that they sprang George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs. They also directly tried to confront and expose the cull planners of that time. Great work. Practically nobody does that today. Practically nobody has the guts to oppose social media or smartphones – it’s more than bloggers’ blogs are worth.
As for “we want a new Bertrand”, where was this blog when the government imposed limited mass house arrest on practically the entire population? (Complaining about not being allowed enough exposure on Facebook probably.) Did it express any clue as to what was happening? Where does it stand on the developments towards mass chipping and the obvious mega-cull that is waiting? It’s essentially the “conscience of journalism” – haha. Nobody needs any of that. Perhaps 100 years ago or even 60 it might have made some sense.
“where was this blog when the government imposed limited mass house arrest …”
In gaol from August to November 2021. However there were a number of posts from CM related to the pandemic before that and also many people posting comments and new threads in the discussion forums. I imagine CM was busy with his appeals and the prospect of gaol time.
You can go have some fun reading through the thousands of posts/comments 🤣.
The UK is a Spookocracy.
“A counterintelligence state (sometimes also called intelligence state, securocracy or spookocracy) is a state where the state security services penetrates and permeates all societal institutions, … “
Keir Starmer’s first Chief of Staff, Sue Gray “took a sabbatical from the Civil Service” in the 1980’s to run a Republican bar in Newry, South Armagh.
Starmer’s second Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney is being backed by powerful forces presumably not directly aligned to MI5.
McSweeney, a 47 year old with no appreciable employment history beyond being a back room functionary for the Labour Party purchased a £750k, sandstone mansion in Lanarkshire as a postal address in support of his wife’s carpetbagging ambitions. Make no mistake, neither McSweeney or his wife actually live there.
Imogen Walker (McSweeney’s wife) is the MP for Hamilton and Clyde. She was parachuted into the constituency contest by head office having negligible connections to Scotland. Walker was confirmed as the candidate by postal votes, having lost out to a local candidate on in-person voting. The very notion of postal voting being a provision for members of a local Labour Party is preposterous.
Why am I reminded of Peter Mandelson’s £373k, covert loan from Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson? A clear case of mortgage fraud which brought down Mandelson’s Ministerial career in 1998. Mandelson was forced back behind the curtain, which is a lesson McSweeney appears to have absorbed, taking care not to reveal himself to scrutiny in the first place.
The fact that McSweeney won out in a power struggle between himself and Senior MI5 Officer Sue Gray is telling.
Someone is backing McSweeney. I wouldn’t overplay the alleged animus between McSweeney and Blair. If it ain’t the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change that’s bankrolling McSweeney, then who is?
Starmer is a serial marionette of shadowy forces whether domestic or international. As for Starmer’s politics, I can’t detect any. It’s all Corporatism and Managerialism. Power as an end in itself.
I may be wrong but pretty sure Imogen Walker is from Dollar, Clacks.
Thanks for the pic Craig. I recognise Russell and Hugh McDiarmid and I feel I should know the guy to the left of Russell but just can’t place him.
Just came across this Guardian article, posted yesterday, and headlined Israeli military changes account of Gaza paramedics’ killing after video of attack, in which it says the following:
Israeli media briefed by the military have reported that troops had identified at least six of the 15 dead as members of militant groups and killed a Hamas figure named Mohammed Amin Shobaki.
None of the 15 killed has that name and no other bodies are known to have been found at the site. The official declined to provide any evidence or detail of how the identifications were made, saying he did not want to share classified information.
“According to our information, there were terrorists there but this investigation is not over,” he told reporters.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/06/israeli-military-admits-initial-account-of-palestinian-medics-killing-was-mistaken
“According to our information…”. Oh, right, perhaps that was ANOTHER mistake! As for the official declining to provide any evidence or detail of how the identifications were made, well of course he did, because it’s complete and utter bollox. So the scenario goes something like this: Israeli troops see vehicles heading towards them suspiciously with no lights etc (even though they did), and regard them as a threat, and they’re just about to start firing on the vehicles when they suddenly identify at least six of the occupants as members of militant groups, and one as a Hamas figure…
Yeah, sure they did. The reality is that after however many days it was – six/seven days – the UN is notified by the IDF that the area is now safe for them to enter, and being sadistic fascist psychopathic mass murdering scum – and knowing of course that crews would be coming to the area to try and determine what happened to their colleagues – a contingent of IDF soldiers were sent out to wait for them to arrive, and then murder and execute them all (except for one, as it transpired). And the great big gynormous elephant in the room is that the IDF have NOT at any point said that they retrieved and, as such, have the weapons these militants and the ‘Hamas figure’ were carrying and armed with, which they surely would have been of course, and the IDF briefed the media to that effect. I mean the IDF being the IDF, they would more-than-likely lay all the weapons out and take a few pictures of them to provide to the media. But nada. And we all know why of course.
And here’s another article I spotted on the Guardian’s website, posted four days ago:
‘I heard them take their last breath’: survivor recounts Gaza paramedic killings
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/03/i-heard-them-take-their-last-breath-survivor-recounts-gaza-paramedic-killings
Dear Craig, I understand that you, like the rest of the world like to be payed for his work, but please don’t make it a demand and please allow people to read your articles on Substack without forcing them to pay for it.
Journalism should be like medicine, to help people, not to sell them what is their rights to have or to know.
Thx
You can subscribe to substack, then read the articles free here when you get a notification of one, if you wish. They will always be free here.
From above, and CM posts the same after each blog post from him:
“Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.”
Reading comprehension is sometimes useful.
As he states, the posts here and on substack are identical. You just won’t see the comments on substack or be able to post comments there.
Craig, we are living in that Mitchell and Webb sketch…. “Are we the baddies?”
I read Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby nearly 20 years ago now… I could not believe the ‘lock’ they had on the US back then and Western Europe is exactly the same. The UK is almost as bad as the US, look what they did to Corbyn in plain site.
I have been saying it since the start the genocide is providing a lens through which we can see what we have become, or rather made into…
The west has been ‘occupied’ just the same as Palestine and we have collectively been ‘Israelified’. Look around you, the indifference and / or the fear to speak up.
And even if you do where do you do it? Not wingsoverscotland sadly… this place is about it these days where free speech is guaranteed.
Ultimately western politicians live by the post-truth policy. It is like facts does not matter to them anymore, it is an incredibly disturbing development. Western politicians could flatly deny that Israel commit this or that crime because there is no one holding the polticiians to account anyway. The politicians and the journalists have merged into 1 subject that represent the same interest, just like any other dictatorship.
The other day Orban invited Netanyahu to Hungary, not a single word of condemnation by the EU. When Orban flew to Russia last year the criticism was overwhelming even though Russia have commited far less war crimes than Israel, but again, facts do not matter for the western politicians.
When politicians/media keep silent about human atrocities in Gaza, what does that normalization do with people? It makes people more accepting of violence, it make people more brutal and it make sure that even more senseless carnage will be ok and that is what happend in Gaza, starting a bit careful Israel quickly realized that they could do whatever they want, the western politicians/media will not protest. Now we are in a situation where 300 children have been killed past weeks and where aid workers have been slaughtered and there is no reaction.
Another core problem is the horrible social media, since most people have not been to Russia nor Gaza and know no russians, arabs etc westerners base their image on these nations/people from what the media tells them plus the last 20 years there have been a rapid closure on what views that could be expressed on these topics, today it is short, dumbed-down anti-intellectual scaremongering headlines that in turn create a false-consciouness in the western social-media user.
When I browse on social media – especially Twitter/X – I am disturbed how much time people spend there and how ignorant people are, a considerable part of westerners are straight out stupid, it is like westerners have no recollection about historic events that occured just 10 years ago (like Maidan, Minsk Agreements) and also lack basic rational, critical thinking, the culture on social media is incredibly primitive, tribal. It should be banned because nothing good comes out of it.
Another problem is that that the left/socialists/labour/greens have abdicted their role, instead of following their, for lack of a better term, left-wing, policies, these groups seems increasingly keen to mimick the typical right-wing ideology: past weeks Starmer have complained about globalization, boasted about how many immigrants he expelled along with that we have his militarism on Russia and bowing down to Israel – like any other right-wing politician.
Craig, thank you for this post.
Craig has succinctly described the problem. Metaphorically or not, as suits you, the devil is laughing at us, evil power believes it can act with impunity.
We cannot act with impunity. We are monitored, surveilled and divided, and we lack the instruments of concentrated power. But act we must.
Vivian, The UK is apparently the most bellicose by far of all the western nations in regards to Russia, the UK populace has also been saturated (and I do mean saturated) with anti russian/putin propaganda in this regard for at 15 years now at least. It really ramped up at one point and has not abated since.
UK military intelligence I read has a very long history in western Ukraine and may have been involved in the original creation of the ‘Bandera movement’ shall we call it and their faux Viking roots etc… it actually sounds very likely to me. MI6 according to Doug Macgregor were providing Zelensky’s personal body guards. ‘We’ run him.
For the life of me I can’t work out why the people behind Starmer have got themselves into this kill or be killed existential clash with a power that will annihilate them (and us). I suspect / speculate they have taken a huge (financial) gamble in Ukraine somehow and the Russian SMO/invasion is causing them to lose their shirts. They just can’t accept defeat even when it is staring them in the face. It is bizarre.
The reason Starmer cut the pensioner heating allowance and disability benefits (and more) is to send the money to Ukraine. Which is exactly what he did. He also made a 100 year pledge to keep doing so, I shit you not. Are the UK media even saying that out loud… what do you think.
It is so bizarre because they gutted the UK’s industrial capacity to go to war over decades and the entire army (fighting and non fighting staff) could currently fit into Old Trafford. Plus we are skint…
Desperate people do desperate things. They seem mad enough to believe that a war economy is the ‘solution’.
@Mac, and what kind of government makes such a 100 year pledge? Not a democratic one, that’s for sure.
I still remember VE day – being with my parents outside the Town Hall with a red, white and blue V on my coat. Then the hopeful feeling in the 1950s that things were certainly better for the working class with offspring like me able to go to University. That now seems like another incarnation. From genocide in my childhood to genocide now. I had expected better.
“From genocide in my childhood to genocide now. I had expected better.”
=======
Arguably, at least for Germany, you HAVE better: lead actor in the first case, best supporting act in the second.
This is a bit like one of those Trompe-l’oeil pictures where some people see an old woman and others see a young girl, yet we’re all looking at the same portrait. If Jordan Peterson is a lightweight (which is debatable) he’s risen to prominence because more serious people who SHOULD have been defending intellectual cut-and-thrust in the universities have deserted their posts and allowed crybully students of questionable intellect to take the place over and “cancel” everyone they don’t like as a “fascist.” I’m simply staggered that anyone could consider leftist ideology to be an impediment to advancement in the academy. To most of the tax donkeys who have to carry the weight of these socialist madrassas it looks like the beginning of a new Soviet Union, where we can see “approved” voices of the left writing about “equity” from their state-funded dachas while the rest of us are starting at the four walls of our brutalist council flats, owning nothing and wondering about when we get to be happy.
What you’re looking out on, Craig, is not some capitalist monster devouring all before it. It’s the pushback from the bottom up that’s been a long time coming. Once you understand that most of us out here — “we the people”, the ordinary suckers in whose name the left claims to do everything — want, more than anything else, to be left alone, things begin to make more sense. When Jeff Bezos spent half a billion dollars treating himself to a new yacht which necessitated taking down a city bridge to get it out of the shipyard, most of us didn’t actually care. Yeah, we thought it was a waste of money, but so what? Bezos was doing something we all want to do. Not buying stupid boats, but creating space around himself. Same story with Zuckerberg buying up all the houses in his superrich neighbourhood so he can control who lives there. We understand this; property is just another word for liberty. Most of us don’t care about being poor so long as the white saviours just leave us the hell alone to say and think what we want.
What has gone wrong is not capitalism, it’s the creation of a caste of midwits out of redbrick universities, middling to poorly educated, but who insist that they’re intellectuals whom the world needs to take it to the next place. People who go on to colonise what is sometimes known as “the blob” in the UK, or the deep state in the US. People who just “know better” than you and who don’t feel the need to put their programmes before the public for approval. Judges who send people to prison for tweets; police officers who turn up team-handed to arrest Whatsapp posters; prime ministers who feel they can publicly declare that supposed rioters are definitely going to prison before they’ve even been arrested, and all of it driven by the cretinous notion that man lives by bread alone, that all humans are the product of economic forces and that they can be “re-engineered” to fit together like some kind of perfect jigsaw.
Well, we can’t, and what your seeing is the realisation that the sixties dream was actually an absolute nightmare. In essence, Craig, you’re trying to sell yourself the equivalent of the mantra that communism would definitely have worked if Trotsky had got the gig instead of Stalin. No, it wouldn’t, because it was a stupid idea from the get-go. It was NEVER going to work, and neither was the counter-culture. The paradox is that only successful societies can produce the kind of nonsense that we’ve been struggling under for the last sixty years. That’s why the Islamic world didn’t have hippies. Not because of religious oppression; that’s irrelevant. It’s because Islamic society is incapable carrying a passenger class producing nothing and getting in the way of those who ARE contributing. It’s why, historically, it was often legally very difficult for Christian subjects of the Ottoman Sultan to convert to Islam; if they did, who would pay the dhimmi tax?
Here’s my advice to the west, Craig, and to you also — we’ve been doing it all wrong for the last six decades. All those ideals we grew up with over the last few generations? They’re wrong. All that stuff our grandparents lived by? That’s what works. It doesn’t work great, and it never works properly, it just works better than anything anyone from anywhere or any time else has ever tried, including us. Put it back the way it was.
Populism, first known to have been practiced in Athens in the Peloponnesian War, has scarcely changed since when Thucydides described it. It is why Athens lost that war. it is not ” the pushback from the bottom up that’s been a long time coming”, but the exploitation of simplistic themes that will appeal to the non-elites by elite politicians. The only successful case I know of where it has worked, for nearly fifty years, is Iran, where the elite were thrown out with the Shah (and have been moaning ever since), but the religious regime has genuinely worked for the people, much better off today, than they were when the Shah and his upper classes stole everything that wasn’t securely tied down, but at the price of religious symbolism. Trumpism hasn’t worked at all, as we see this very day, with the collapse of the markets, in the style of 1930 and the Smoot-Hawley act.
While
has long been true of the British Empire in wide swathes of policy under the Royal Prerogative, this blight does appear to be spreading, and reflected in the language of British and USAmerican administrations. So, Britain’s Allies are not the public’s choice of friends, and USAmerican imperial policy is in no way to be influenced by democratic sentiment and argument: the ‘permanent government’ and ‘deep state’ determine all the most important policies insulated from (actually by) elections, the merest veneer of democratic semblance.
But this is not the real problem. The real problem is governance by human Will, elite or popular, instead of governance for Health. Which is why democracy (which can have all the faults of oligarchy including belligerence and xenophobia) is not the cure for these ills. And genocide in Gaza is part of global ecocide.
#biocracynow
Craig, I agree with most of the items on the list in your second sentence, except for the deliberate narrative of russophobia. After Russian behaviour in Georgia, transnistria and Ukraine, and putin s statements that Ukraine is not a real country, is it not prudent for western countries to rearm? If you seek pace, prepare for war, and all that. It always amazes that people who right about Israel vis a vis Palestine are often wrong about Russia vis a vis Ukraine, And vice versa. What do you think? Also, what do you think are the chances of a referendum in the disputed and occupied areas of Ukraine? Nobody seems very bothered about what the inhabitants of these areas think about what country they want to belong to .
Dr John Coleman used to write medical columns in the newspapers until he started becoming aware of trends among the powerful who were herding the western nations into uncomfortable conformity. His books are very informed and informative. I would have preferred a different link than to Amazon, but anyway, here it is for just three of his many publications. I believe he now prints to order his latest books. He is indeed very knowledgeable.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Coleman-Conspirators-Hierarchy-Committee/dp/B000VCHK6E
Well, I see a little more nuance I think. Although I didn’t live then, I find it hard to agree that the 1960s were any better. The eastern half of Europe had nothing even getting close to free speech. The western half was going through a Franco hell in Spain, shortly to be overshadowed by the Basque uprising, the Irish civil war and then by the Balkan war in the south. The US was relentlessly bombing Vietnamese civilians while China just concluded the annexation of Tibet and started a slow extermination of the Tibetans who today effectively ceased to exist as a separate ethnic group, let alone a nation. The Nakba also happened at that time.
Yes, there were academics in the West who were able to spread progressive ideas. There were others who were thrown in prisons for being gay or opposing conscription. It was not all roses and sunshine these days, honestly.
Most disgusting for me is that the youth of the 1960s, who then protested the Vietnam war and social inequalities, are the ones who are running countries and corporations nowadays.
As much as the genocide in Gaza is revolting, it’s neither the first nor the last genocide in the world’s history. Obviously. I’d be keen to understand their causes and mechanisms, which my gut feeling says may have more to do with developed national/ethnic identity, competition for resources, and the innate fear of “the other”, common to the entire human species. It may be very simplistic to blame everything on politicians.
I mean, politicians mostly strive to respond to social expectations in order to be popular; they are usually too weak to influence what the society expects. The recent rise of the extreme right is not something planned by the mainstream parties; they actively try to prevent it by adopting right-wing narratives themselves, but without policies to ensue. Statistic shows that immigration peaked under the Tories in the UK, and under PiS in Poland, yet these parties are commonly perceived as anti-immigrant, correct? It’s no coincidence. Starmer’s Labour only adopts a left-wing narrative, yet the policies it enacts have nothing to do with progressiveness; it’s only an trick to prevent the real progressives to form a left-wing party. If you or me were running a political party that suddenly had to compete for the same electorate, we’d probably do the same.
Politics is disgusting, and it was the same in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and today. QED.