This televisual farce belies any residual the claim that there is any animating democratic spirit left in the actually existing duopolistic American presidential electoral process.
There is no democracy in America. A gigantic neoconservative pincer movement is in operation, the purpose of which is to frighten and corral the American voters by causing (or at least have the cover of such a conceivable cause) them to feel existentially obligated to vote for Clinton contra the specter of a Putin-backed American proxy in the politically holographic (hollow) figure of Donald Trump, resulting in a Clinton presidential win (pseudo-democratic coup) as fait accompli (or the cover of the argument as such in the case of outright total electoral fraud).
Improvisationally or otherwise, the Brexit campaign was a coup for the most radical and buccaneering elements within Britain's reactionary oligarchy. Britain will now be both empire-less and Europe-less, set politically and institutionally adrift from the solidarity of concerted progressive and social democratic action in the political centers of an albeit neoliberal, yet essentially pacific, EU. A ship of foolish (i.e. fooled) Brexiters indisputably controlled by the most oligarchical faction of diminished Britain's neoliberal elite. The future, an identity-less post-modernized aircraft carrier of American hegemony on the North Atlantic, guarding Europe's Western door for the benefit of the latter, in other words, its gaoler/confiner against vitality, influence, and expansion in the North Atlantic region, perfidious bookend to the Ukraine's own American (bicephalic) satellitic function against the security of both Russia and EU. The loss of Britain and the "gain" of Ukraine are indisputable, perhaps fatal, disasters for the independent security of a unified Europe caught between a passive, but nuclear Russia, and an equally nuclear, but manifestly "preemptively" aggressive U.S.
"The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."--Nuremberg Trial Proceedings
"The Chilcot Report has rightly dug deep into the litany of failures of planning for the occupation, the calamitous decision to stand down the Iraqi army and to dissolve the Iraqi state.
"But the reality is it was the original decision to follow the US president into an unprovoked war in the most volatile region of the world and impose a colonial-style occupation that led to every other disaster."-- British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn
The pregnant lessons of Nuremberg were clearly not forgotten by the Bush and Blair governments, but nevertheless having been so scrupulously rejected they predictably, indeed with a reproducibility that eludes almost all other intrinsically chaotic mass undertakings of men, again birthed "the accumulated evil of the whole...not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect[ing] the whole world."
Brexit is real, Trump is fake. That's the difference between British and American democracy. Clinton will be the next president of the U.S., from which aerie she will be able to widely contemplate the chaos that she and the other "hawks" have wrought across the Greater Middle East region and beyond, and which for some time now has erosively been spilling, nay flooding over the EU, Russia, even into China. The disintegration of the Middle East nation state is both inversely and perversely reflected in the imperiled condition of the supranational European state, with the UK's defection from the latter being a most astonishing example of a perfect circularity of consequences: The Bushite-Blairite grand plan to transform (i.e. destabilize) and refashion the Middle East nation state in the image of an 'enlightened' neoliberal post- and supranational order may ultimately prove to be the concept that as praxis seeded the whirlwind that set in motion the collapse of the neoliberal pro-Nato EU suprastate edifice itself.
It strikes me the attacker was above all mentally ill. His terrorism claims were deeply intermixed with his illness, but to the extent he recognized his illness he likely ascribed it to the dysfunction of American society itself, perhaps even as a conspiratorially-directed attack against himself and others by unseen political forces.
It may also be that humdrum quotidian life had become secondary to him as he entered deeper and deeper into an Internet-enveloped fantasy world of psychosomatic dependence, which in itself was a sort of virtual medication for his dysphoric and depressive states. The Internet-filtered 'ontology' became more real, more directing, than actual reality, which either was the source of the dysphoria, or could do little to compete against the narcotic and palliating power against said dysphoria afforded by the Internet. The Internet, as a narcotizing agent-cum-source of information, afforded a toxic blend of narcotized or intensely psychosomaticized ideas, namely the subconscious desire to becoming permanently integrated into its now indispensable virtuality, an occurrence which could be 'materialized' through his own dematerialization, i.e. death, through a heinous yet socially (and perhaps even historically) significant traumatic event: i.e. an extremely high 'kill rate' attack tinged with potentially highly resonant and delineating political messaging. Indeed, as the killer was in the midst of his attack, it has been reported, he repeatedly checked Facebook and other online media for reflexive manifestations of his attack, yet the Internet was not simply a mirror of his acts, but the impulser of his feelings and thoughts, i.e the primary prism of his personal reality--his death during the unforgettably devastating attack would insure that his life would be 'uploaded' to the highest degree informationally and technologically possible onto the Internet, he would finally be fully integrated into his primary, most real, essential and necessary sphere of existence. He would lose his soul, according to normal human quotidian accounting, but enter the 'heaven' of an enveloping virtuality where everything was permissible, relative, and forgiven.
Perhaps they will have to start having to give these suicidal young men prizes not to go on murderous rampages, which offer them the 'prize' of posthumous notoriety.
As a secret demographic these men have the potential to hold America effectively hostage. The message sent through the chain of like phenomena is: 'If you treat me unfairly in a significant way, I am operatively free as an American to react in a massively damaging way, with an unforgettable vengeance equal to that of the ancient gods, I have the freedom to accumulate an arsenal sufficient to fulfill this threat, this promise!'
Neoliberalism having established a permanent regime of a labor and thus existential insecurity, especially for less well educated young men, a pattern seems to be becoming established whereby a minority of such men 'dare' to realize their fantasies of destroying such a system by attacking its unprotected innocent civilian underbelly. The acts are the most debased form of insanity, but the undeniable pattern has its own self-extensive message and logic, it is a story being written on an ever-extending wall of bloody and merciless executions motivated by the most denatured atavistic idealizations of male autonomous honor.
There are clearly no longer free presidential elections in America; Trump is a Potempkin candidate. As far as presidential elections are concerned, America is no longer a democracy.
Also, in the case of Turkey, it appears as though an Islamist intolerance for free inquiry, investigation, and analysis of religious texts and the social universe they seek to create, contain, and encapsulate must necessarily--for it is the same--result in political repression, to the gestural and symbolic level of even free academic and professional (as well as informal) discourse, ergo the arrests of prominent journalists of various political stripes.
How can anything, at least as far as foreign and military policy, that Obama says be believed when it has been amply demonstrated in academic studies that the U.S. is a plutocracy, ruled by private industries and Crassus-like individuals, and as such has frequently no insentives (quite the contrary) to truly inform its citizens regarding its true geopolitical aims and policies, their true effects and costs (in other words, the real human, sociopolitical, and environmental logic and economy of ongoing imperialism)?
Human beings will take pleasure from wherever they can find it, even, perhaps especially, from the barrel of a gun.
Perhaps this latest terrible and unreal incident was pleasurable fantasy disguised as vengeful indignation, the sort that likely eventually also fuels the psychopathy of the many young persons recruited or conscripted by ISIS.
These escalating series of events, in the case of Russia's involvement in Syria, suggest--an almost too neat of--a pattern headed in the direction of greater, more costly catastrophes for it in Syria and perhaps elswehere.
A prescient comment or was it that "plane" to see? : 'Tsar Peter I [Putin's favorite Russian leader - KR] used to say: "...don't trust a Turk..."
'Turkey has always, throughout history, played on the contradictions of the interests of Russia and the West. And the sudden concern of Erdogan about accidental trespassing of a Russian fighter jet into Turkish airspace from Syria should not be taken as NATO's sincerity. Such situations arise almost daily on all border territories worldwide. What can we say about those occasions, where there are military operations in those areas...'
Needless to say a situation of such great instability in Syria has only managed to attract regional and great powers into the melee, seeking geopolitical fortune and security in equal and inextricable measure. The downing of a Russian bomber jet by Turkey has great symbolic significance, of course, destroying along with the aircraft itself Russia's air of great power (direct) untouchability.
As concerns the most recent attacks in Paris, ISIS's alleged modus operandi of attacking young people congregating in cafes in a working-class neighborhood and a theatre seem almost willfully counterproductive to the stated claims of being motivated by Western airstrikes against civilians, and especially women and children, in Syria. During the Algerian War as well as during the French, and later American, wars in Indochina the opinion and democratic pressure of the citizenry, and most especially the youth, of the aforementioned Western powers served to curtail and uitimately end those wars to the benefit of the insurgent autochthonous/regional forces. Would it therefore not have made sense for ISIS/Daesh to have attempted something along similar political and strategic lines, i.e. the courting of the sympathy of the democratic forces, and especially the youth populations of the Western countries in question, considering their claimed purposes of seeking a cessation of Western aggression and intervention in the regions they control/seek to control? The democratic and intellectual response in France to the Algerian War, and in the U.S. to the Vietnam War, arguably made the aforesaid countries more democratic, pliable, and responsive to their citizens, while the ongoing and ever-intensifying so-called 'wars on terror' threaten to make all the countries that engage in such wars much less so.
"And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival."--George Orwell
"Nous sommes en guerre!"--President Hollande
War, and, above all, state-sanctioned war, has almost always been bad news for democracy. Without the great state-sanctioned wars of the twentieth century the major countries of the West would all have been egalitarian democracies by now.
" The President had accepted the finding of the Department of Justice that all ISIS fighters were unlawful combatants not subject to Geneva Convention protections. They were like pirates of old, and piracy was stamped out only when governments began hanging them."
Mark my words, Russia will indirectly be blamed for this: "they intervened in Syria and as a consequence things escalated terribly, the world is now an indisputably more dangerous place because of Putin's Syrian hubris and folly."
I submit to you that "quantum politics" has already become a reality and that the two candidates of the only televised parties become quantumly entangled with each other and with the greater public; it is this very literal quantum entanglement which actually determines the results of presidential electoral debates and, if the democracy true, the result of the election.
On the topic of the recent ‘Islamist terrorist plot’ in Texas: it is my impression that AFDI was provoking insane people who happened to consider themselves Muslims. The religiously-mad and the amorously-mad have much in common in this regard as both are wont to claim that another person has power over their life, over their ability to live/die, on the basis of certain idiosyncratically volatilizing words, etc., to which the aggrieved responds: “If you leave me I will die,” “If you leave me I will die and so will you,” “If you leave me we both will die but will be united in heaven!;” “If you draw this image you will die,” “If you draw this image I will die too,” “If you draw this image we both will die and I will be rewarded with love in heaven!”
Provoking demented people, whose mania involves an obsession with the gorier aspects of Islamic history, is of a larger well-established genre, one whose common (and dangerous) dynamics frequently implicate a topic that has come to mark an age, to the level of mania, with the most literally susceptible to mania responding as literal maniacs, i.e. illogically, impetuously, and often violently, without regard to their own or others’ well-being. Most people only come closest to encountering such dynamics, if at all, in sexual-affective relationships; but if one indefatigably seeks them out and sticks one’s neck out in a superfluity of other contexts (especially in those that have been mediatized ad nauseam and naturally have come to populate the imaginations of the already insane) one will not fail to find them.
As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek recently commented in the New Statesman, the Islamism that is confronting Europe, of course the Middle East, and elsewhere, is itself a product of modernity (colonialism, disenfranchisement, neoliberalism, etc.) and not one of Koranic orthodoxy (so that it is inessential to the germ of the text) and is manifesting itself very similarly, in terms of heretofore unseen degrees of violence, in Libya to Syria to Mexico to Central America to Brazil to South Africa, etc. What connects all these fracturing/fully-fractured societies is, besides the fundamental damage caused by historical Western colonialism, their tensive and consequently explosive unpreparedness before the (supposedly neutralizing) relativity of neoliberal modernity (in all its vertiginous social, sexual, etc., individualizing difference). What was more subtly accrued in a West defined by its significant Middle Class is being far more precipitously (and we are seeing disastrously) imposed on far poorer, more traditional, patriarchal, ‘honor’-type societies (which are of course not limited to Islamic countries, vide historically caste-defined countries of Latin America and India). So this explosive phenomenon of ‘Islamist terrorism’ is simply the most dramatic manifestation of the more general phenomenon of hyper-imposed neoliberal modernity on societies too poor and too traditional to withstand it without experiencing an explosive ressentiment which is later twisted and disfigured by the factories of neoliberal ideology into ‘centralities’ that are in fact tangential to the actual source and essence of the destructive phenomenon.
The hegemon recognizes no limits on specific actions of its power, but what is truly worse is the incognizance/indifference of the citizenry of such a vast power (ostensibly democratic), especially relative to civic consciences of its cohorts in other advanced Western democratic countries--but then this is the power of ideology, and the American political oligarchy like no other.
This Der Spiegel article on the "secret files" of the Islamic State (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html) certainly has more of the ring of truth than the Atlantic's article of a month ago. The surprise is that the paradoxes, contradictions, and very seemingly (even before this revelatory article) Machiavellian, secular, and criminal underpinnings of the organization weren't deemed more apparent and probable by the MSM than the tales ISIS self-servingly told of itself, an organization that, through its facility with mass murder, more resembles SS Einsatzgruppen, than one permeated and inspired at its highest levels by a Koranic enlightenment (an absurd association on the very face of it). In short, the Islamic state strikes one as having far more in common 'subcutaneously' to Mexican cartels barbarously occupying (exploiting, terrorizing) entire cities and even states than to a genuine revolutionary force (if by revolutionary one understands a movement motivated by the implementation of a genuine alternate Idea, in the Platonic sense, of the constitution of society).
P.S. " ...the embassy is virtually an armed camp, rather than being a window on American for locals or a place from which US diplomats can get to know local society." The same can be said, with hardly any guilt of exaggeration, of American consulates/interests in certain important, even key Mexican cities.
The psychology at work with groups (i.e. the individuals they indoctrinate) such as ISIS is to use religion (in this case, of course, Islam) to justify rapine and rape and therefore add a layer of deceptive and distortive righteous outrage to their piratical appropriation of what they had no hand in building or preserving. Such rapacity characterizes, in a more sophisticated form, the plunder of economies and polities by globalized financial industries (inextricable from the global drug trade and other illicit and antisocial activities), but also that of many ancient Roman usurper emperors, who, having bloodily achieved power, would establish themselves as the center of a renewed imperial cult and proceed to terrorize, rob, and murder arbitrarily or systematically, but always with an assumed (though often self-convinced) zealous righteousness born of innate or engendered psychopathy given sustenance and coherence by the technologies of ideology. Chaos was inserted into the Middle East not by Islam, which abhors it, but by Western imperialism which has never overcome its fascination with the Caesarean strategy of 'divide et impera.'
Clearly ISIS is an extraordinary anti-nationalist force hell-bent on destroying the historic particularities of particular Arab nations, this decimation of regional cultural identities can only benefit those state actors with pretensions to regional hegemony: namely Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States (which are zealously anti-Iraqi), and Israel. Seemingly the intent is to create a civilizational wasteland constituting Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and a significant portion of Iran. Leaving only Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, and Israel as masters of such an post-Arab-nationalist apocalypse.
Methinks this is largely sophistry on Giuliani's part, this man is not unintelligent and so what he does is calculated in so far as it constitutes bland psychologizing as opposed to arguments characterized by analytical rigor--for such qualities would in themselves be informative and constructively emulatable and therefore truly popularly empowering and therefore communistic-seeming and thus obscene to elements of the elite, so that in its very vacuity of content Giuliani's position embodies anti-democratic obscurantism and deception, while Obama's is a style that never quite fully surrenders itself in its self-hypnotic fervor to the aforementioned obscurantism, incuriosity, and willful credulity of a Giuliani or even a Hillary.
Philosopher Alain Badiou’s recent comments on the topic: “The world is subject to the ruling international oligarchy and enslaved to the abstraction of money – the only recognised universal…A mediocre intellectual conformism has established itself…– a both plaintive and complacent form of resignation that goes hand in hand with the lack of any future. Any future, that is, other than rolling out what already exists in repetitive fashion.
“And now we see the emergence of its counterpart. This is a logical and horrifying reaction, a hopeless and fatal one, a mix of corrupt capitalism and murderous gangsterism. Giving subjective form to the death drive, it maniacally retreats into the most varied identities. This identitarian retreat in turn sparks arrogant, identitarian counter-identities.
The general plot of this story is the West – homeland of the dominant, civilised capitalism – clashing with ‘Islamism’ – the reference point of bloody terrorism. Appearing against this backdrop we have, on the one hand, murderous armed gangs or individuals with stockpiles of their own, which they wave around in order to force everyone to honour the corpse of some deity; on the other hand, savage international military expeditions mounted in the name of human rights and democracy, which destroy entire states (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Mali, the Central African Republic…). These wars have thousands of victims, and they never achieve anything more than negotiating a precarious peace with the worst bandits in order to secure the oil fields, mines, food resources and enclaves where big business can prosper.”
This view coincides with the one predicted by American geopolitical strategist Philip Bobbitt a few years ago: “Terrorism in the era of the market state will reflect the nature of the market state” since contemporary terrorism is itself an outgrowth of “the transition from nation states to market states.”
The paradoxical particulars of the ISIS economy reflect this: “Where does Islamic State get its money? In an interview, terrorism expert Louise Shelley says it operates like a run-of-the-mill crime syndicate in which ideology takes a back seat to money making.” There is apparently little they will not traffic in, least of all pornography.
ISIS’s whole operation seems to be a particularly pestilential and attritive form of capitalism–akin to the one adopted by the narcocracies of Mexico and beyond.
All these terrorist acts in the name of Islam establish an unhealthy debt between the vast majority of normal Muslims residing in Western countries and the non-Muslim native population, or the significant portion of the latter, which up to the present time has made the effort to go through the cognitive process of rightly concluding that, as individuals, the great majority of Muslims would never act in the terroristic ways of the recent, demented attackers who use Islam pretextually to carry out what are in fact nihilistic acts of violence. Inversely, these terroristic acts very likely also have the effect of discouraging and dampening the protestive spirit of sizable numbers within said Muslim immigrant population, who, if not for the Islam-connected attacks in the heart of Europe, would find no unseemly complications/strategic hindrances to the organization of more frequent protests against a revived and catastrophic Western imperialism in the Middle East and in much of the Islamic world in general.
The man was insane, indeed, seemingly possessed. He would see the two women, and the combination of their comely features and pious hijabs drove him to an apoplexy which such an unreflective creature as he could never possibly have recognized or understood. And so he walked mindlessly, gun in hand, to murder because his own doom did not matter or even occur to him. Such is the insanity of true visceral hate.
Guantanamo is a Mengelian experimentation camp designed to torture both innocent human beings and the American constitution, they do not want it closed nor any of the prisoners freed because they are not finished with the experimentations, quite the contrary, the point is to see just how much torture, incremental or intensive, Americans' civil liberties, international human rights, and the American constitution itself can endure before finally expiring.
I posted this the night before the attack on another website, but I think it acquires an additional, terrible significance and meaning after the fact: "Houellebecq is sincere when he says that Western civilization is hollow to its core and only Islam can save it, his is a truly intelligent, radical, and prescient (indeed alchemical or kabbalistic) response to that gargantuan, continent-sized malaise that, for example, (and here lies the crux of the controversy) Breivik was also responding to, but while the latter would and could only transform himself into a blood-soaked caricature (though quite actually “demon” possessed) of a Dostoevskian “underground” or “superfluous” man, Houellebecq has the capacity, which is above all a creative ability, to resort to the relative equanimity, the sangfroid, the intuition (which is a sort of purity despite all) of the genuine artist, and this makes the transformative possibilities of his impulses, the “eppur-si-muove” power of his vision, all the more actual and existent, because it has not been exhausted, aborted, or made monstrous by self-destruction or destruction of the other." http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/houellebecq-submission/#post-comments
“Une caricature sanglante” of Islam made monstrously literal at Charlie Hebdo?
The Soviet Union sought to destroy religion while the CIA and its world associate governments have succeeded in perverting it, especially Islam, to point where it has become not the religion of an ancient prophet but that of Dostoevskian anarchism and possession, a perpetual motion machine of terroristic repetition ad nauseam (an eternal return of insanity), a mise-en-abyme of imperial pretextuality for war and intervention abroad.
The CIA believes in the efficacy of the psychology of rape, in the transformative effect, if you will, in the case of men, of anal rape. Is this homophobic primitive psychologizing on the part of the CIA, or this there genuine scientific substance to the transformative psychological effect, to its ability to alter a personality, to make it more pliant, controlable and to effect a dissolution of personality, in the case of men and in ways that other forms of torture and psychological manipulation cannot?
The American ruling class may be described as enraptured by the visions and the ‘religion’ of neoliberalism–that metaphysical ideal of a universally realized and permeating American ‘empire of the mind,’ that takes as its existential model technology itself, obviously especially the more advanced militaristic, telecommunicational, and computational. Consequently, when it should be thinking historically, diplomatically, anthropologically, it instead thinks in concepts taken directly from computational and communicational models: to wit, the Internet, cybernetics, advanced telematics, artificial intelligence. As a consequence the lived ‘real’ becomes even more subsumed and subordinate to the metaphysical figurations of a determinative technological futurity that may itself end up being no more than a historical fetish, one of the many to which highly ideological systems, such as the American, are chronically, perhaps constitutionally, susceptible to (the wars in the Middle East and the meddling in Ukraine, which even Foreign Affairs magazine has come out against, may perhaps be seen as other fallaciously-grounded instances of this).
A neoliberal union of fragmented and downsized Arab and 'post-Iranian' states constellated around the principal regional satellites of American hegemony: Israel and Saudi Arabia? In other words, a Nato and EU-like military and politico-economic Middle Eastern superstructure as imposed 'teleological finish line' of a CIA-midwifed Thirty Years War-type socially and constitutionally reorganizing process? Former Czech president Vaclav Klaus speaks of something similar, to be sure, when he says: ‘I’m not just criticising the EU arrangements — at the same time I’m very critical of global governance and the shift to transnationalism. A week ago I was in Hong Kong and I criticised the naive opening up of countries without keeping or maintaining the anchoring of the nation state. Doing this leads either to anarchy, or to global governance. My vision for Europe is a Europe of sovereign nation states, definitely. But we have already gone well beyond simply economic integration. The EU is a post-democratic and post-political system.’ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9322652/europe-needs-systemic-change/
"Both Sunni and Shia states are threatened by the IS. We must find a way, through imaginative and adept diplomacy, to so triangulate these relationships that both Iran and her clients, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states that feel threatened by Iran, come to rely on the power of out-of-area countries like the US and the UK to reassure them about each other and against their common foe." http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/philip-bobbitt-the-west-must-look-beyond-the-use-of-force-alone-9757353.html
And is this not precisely the crux of the matter and the meaning of the implication: the sustained reliance by the region on an external, 'levitating' organizational military power, perhaps one patterned on NATO but with, at least incipiently, Anglo-American (and perhaps later Israeli-Saudi as well) control and command. Will ISIS and the looming danger of yet unborn ISISes be the form taken by the path that leads to the market-statal, indeed supra-statal 'domestication' of the region for the global neoliberal order? Is ISIS, as suggests Australia's highest ranking military General David Morrison, citing Clinton foreign policy strategist Philip Bobbitt's concept of the 'long war,' a perhaps teologically necessary phase and facet in the ulimate constitutional reorganization of the region along market-statal, post-nationalist, hegemonically supra-statal lines? http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/army-chief-predicts-a-long-war-as-us-and-arab-states-hit-is-in-syria-20140923-10l1nt.html
The execrableness of the policy lies of course in the displaced and dead hundreds of thousands, principally in Near Asia and the Middle East consequent to hegemonic attempts at resource control and the optative emasculation of statal rivals. But, ultimately the operating vision is one of an “empire of the mind,” whereby American imperialism qua mental state (in the dual or triple senses of the phrase) incessantly expands, colonizes, Ebola-like, the mental territories of billions of human minds with the psychological and even somatic patterns and dynamics that sustain this virtual ever-replicating, mise-en-abyming empire that rather thinks it has lifted itself by virtue of the conceptual and technological into the deterritorialized sphere of the Internetic “cloud” and beyond. The question is will this true “empire of lies” have fully engulfed us within it before we could become aware of its systemically contradictory demise, and/or will the psychosis of infinitely mirrored and mirroring lies have irreversibly trespassed and transferred our human consciences into a new and irrevocable transhuman state, in line with the robotic, cybernetic, and in general the technologico-economic: the singular, unitary, and ontologically anti-communal? Isolated in a shared hell of permanently damaged inhumanity?
It's obvious that the U.S. does not view itself as limited by international law, certainly in cases where its supposed national security is concerned (was the assassination of Bin Laden consonant with such law?). As the world's most powerful nation it is also the freest to disregard such international strictures; no doubt many other countries would prefer the reality, if not the impropriety, of such relatively illimited operational license.
But where is the evidence that "Russia is...desperately afraid of ISIL...and happy enough that the US had decided to intervene against it"? ISIS is indifferentiable (despite what much--but not all--of the U.S. policy establishment has said), as there is nothing uniquely ominous about it, being as it is but a manifestation of a far more monstrous and indomitable condition: that of the multi-operative dynamics of ethnic and sectarian survival and destruction "atavized" and energized by prolonged "a-statality." The perception of a necessity of prolonging and (at least episodically) intensifying attritional disorder, by powers external and regional, is the true ominous force haunting the region. ISIS's "degradation," even to the point of nullity, would not in itself resolve or transform such an underlying perniciously anti-human reality, having, as it has, been crescendoed by what has become an oscillative and self-dynamizing force of factors and not by one simplistically self-determining/fate-mastering actor. Other "ISISes" would soon form and occupy the critical void of Iraq's Babylonian plain unless the statal dynamic is permanently transformed in the "Shia Crescent." And is this not precisely the real "desperate" fear of Russia's, that the U.S. will use the pretext of an ephemerality such as ISIS to permanently remove the few non-hegemonically allied bloc(k)s, i.e. Syria and Iran, impeding its triumviral strategy (with Israel and Saudi Arabia) in the region? As Kissinger recently expressed: " Iran [has] the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire...From a geo-strategic point of view, I consider Iran a bigger problem than ISIS." Conspicuously he did not say anything about Russia, or even Iran, perceiving ISIS as a "problem" commensurate with a "geo-strategic, permanent reality." But rather that the aforesaid were concerned with extending or preserving their territorial "patrimony" from the grasp of the U.S (and, by extension, those in its camp and under its shield). http://www.npr.org/2014/09/06/346114326/henry-kissingers-thoughts-on-the-islamic-state-ukraine-and-world-order
“The model for world order that Mr. Kissinger repeatedly returns to is the so-called Westphalian peace, negotiated in Europe at the end of the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48 at a time when conditions in Europe, he says, roughly approximated those of the contemporary world: 'a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to defeat all the others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal practices, in search of neutral rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict.'" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/books/in-world-order-henry-kissinger-sums-up-his-philosophy.html?_r=0
In the present case these decidedly unneutral "rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict” would be essential to the prolongation of declining hegemony by enabling the affected erstwhile superpower to amplify or magnify its remaining politico-economic “weight” via the appropriation or, at the very least, parasitization and instrumentalization of new and existing regional and global nexuses of military and economic power–with extortionary threats of controlled terror, chaos, and regime change serving as the stick and an “equitable” partage with sufficiently “right thinking” and emulative world oligarchies as the carrot.
In short, the U.S. seeks to "robotize" global interdependence (i.e. make of it an articulated and controllable carapace) in order to amplify the force of its diminishing hegemony.
[Corrected version] It appears that the strategy being followed involves the creation of a Thirty Years’ War-type of destructive-constructive dialectic culminating in the fragmentation of the major independent, non-aligned (with the American lead market-state system) states and powers in the Middle East. In the place of large nationalist, powerfully rivalrous regional states would be created ethnic/sectarian client statelets a la the Gulf States, militarily independently impotent. These permanently manageable non-nationalist, non-ambitious (militarily), almost thoroughly subjacent entities would of course necessarily form part of larger military and economic discipline-imposing zones and organizations: a Middle Eastern “Nato”-type alliance lead by the U.S./Saudi Arabia/Israel and of course a European Union-type neoliberal (or “market state”) economic bloc. In such a way and through such horrendous “birthing pangs” a (religio-culturally) “post-medieval” and (politically) post cold war-nationalist Middle East would arise, one finally approximating Europe, East Asia, and North America in its religio-cultural post-modernity and market-determined political “consensus,” albeit with a stronger residual flavoring of religiously-derived social conformity, a la Japan’s. The risks for the strategists of this longue durée scenario: a thoroughly demoralized, anarchized, and criminalized neocolonial society reminiscent of Central America’s and of other parts of Latin America.
Predictive/imposed determinism translates (for the purposes of the NSA) into a regime of political and economic unidimensionality over the entirety of the world and over all the human individuals contained within it; it is a subject that is amply documented in academic sources, and yet there is hardly any mention of it in Wikileaks' entire archives. On the other hand, predictive analytics/determinism forms the very substance of and the basis for the Snowden revelations; how to explain the yawning discrepancy between the paucity of testimony of predictive/imposed determinism in the Wikileaks archives on the one hand, and its overwhelming corroboration, indeed instantiation, by Snowden's NSA-centered revelations on the other?
How is it possible, more specifically, for American authorities in the White House, State, Pentagon and elsewhere to say with a straight face that ISIS is ""Beyond anything we've seen" and by implication that as far as their predictive analytics are concerned it was an inconceivable development, when, for example, Philip Bobbitt seems to have very much anticipated the development of such terroristic "market states" in his book 'Terror and Consent'? And, in turn, how is it possible for the press to accept such astounding and astoundingly profuse professions of institutional blindness, unpreparedness, and ineptness without nary a published and credited remark of incredulity or skepticism?
ISIS is interestingly, and in contrast to many traditional insurgent and terrorist groups, symbolic of a recrudescence of capitalism and not a revolutionary break from of it. It neither practically nor ideologically rejects capitalism, indeed, through its combination of marauding brigandage, opportunistic and indiscriminate mercantilism (e.g. clandestine trafficking), and rational usurpation and utilization of preexisting resources and infrastructures it conspicuously embodies an extreme form of it. Such a form was predictively described by American foreign policy strategist Philip Bobbitt as a terroristic reflection of the emerging capitalist market state itself (which exists for the “maximization of opportunities” for economic expansion in contrast to nation states’ promise of improvements in mass material well-being): “Terrorism in the era of the market state will reflect the nature of the market state. It will be decentralised, disseminated via the internet, and threaten the use of WMD and germ warfare…It could come from a number of other sources…and when it does come the potential for disaster will be extreme.” Indeed, the aforesaid makes the claim that “the primary driver of terrorism is not Islam but the emergence of market states (like the U.S…)”. Perhaps the intentionality behind such “primary” drives is more direct and concerted than the author would care to admit.
"... draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents - tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun." ---Noam Chomsky describing a deserter's account of the training received by CIA-backed Salvadoran death squads http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html
Obama's cynicism is too inept, too transparent--not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the magician has no wand.
IS, despite its anarchically fearless appearance, would of course never think of attacking Turkey, or Jordan, or Israel; it strikes as being a principally anti-Iranian creature/machine.
Israel has from the first seen Palestinians as comparable to Native Americans who must be expelled or eliminated as they were expected to resist Israeli colonization (as all natives would)--this in the words of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, one of the Zionist founders of Irgun.
The Israeli state project from the first has been both exclusionary and revolutionary: to create and maintain a majoritarian Jewish state that has the social and economic dynamism of the most advanced countries of the West, but while the latter have become inclusive and multi-cultural to the point of being nearly post-majoritarian, Israel perceives this same possibility as an existential threat that must contradictorily be countered by the incessant and spiraling revolutionary force of Western extra-limitality in the service of a prophetic, Babylonian-era identity. Such schizophrenia writ large to the level of atomically-armed national identity cannot realistically be viewed as anything other than the most maladaptive madness, considering the insolubly obstructive demographic and sectarian realities of the region--there can be no return to the Israeli empire of 1000 BCE, except, it seems, in the exclusionary yet hegemonic teleology of Israel's present leaders and planners.
Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote in his 1923 essay "The Iron Wall":
"We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism.
Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.
That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible. And we are all of us, without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power, should carry out this task vigorously and with determination. In this matter there is no difference between our "militarists" and our "vegetarians". Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.
We all demand that there should be an iron wall. Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about "agreement" which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. Empty rhetoric of this kind is dangerous. And that is why it is not only a pleasure but a duty to discredit it and to demonstrate that it is both fantastic and dishonest." (http://www.jabotinsky.org/multimedia/upl_doc/doc_191207_49117.pdf)
Switch the British with the Americans and add the Iron Dome to the "Iron Wall" and we have the present state of things in uncompensated occupied Palestine.
Netanyahu's "terror tunnels" are certainly real: they are the tunnels bored by his psychological warfare into the minds of a world and especially an Israeli audience; they are the infliction of visual terror on the world through the images of indiscriminate, violent, and effective state impunity, and among its calculated effects is the frustration and demoralization of emotionally and ethically-sensible people everywhere, of those millions who still believe in universal humanitarian ideals--this very much warlike regime apparently wishes to shock us out of that "illusion."
This can only be judged to be a genocidal war against the disprotected poor (the U.N. is no protection). These are state massacres against concentrations of essentially stateless people under the cover of fighting terrorism and asymmetrical aggression. The existence of violent “defenders” of stateless camps and dispossessed ghettoes (e.g. Hamas) can of course only ultimately benefit an established nation-state bent on a pre-decided/opportunistic genocidal solution to extraneous populations on its borders (with the assumption that the reigning international climate is one of de facto permissibility/self-interested collusion or selective anarchy).
The U.S. is in no way a sort of neutral Platonic state without base and mundane (including 'subterranean') interests. One must apply one's skepticism realistically (which is not to say binarily or even with axiomatic impartiality/neutrality), the advancement of geopolitical power over adversaries and 'allies' alike is what is at play here (in this sinister event) and in a default generality, humanitarian concerns and publicly circulating notions of 'justice' are employed by states principally to dress and address events in formulaic and Manichean cliches that promote geostrategic aims in publicly acceptable/intelligible fashion, all the while maintaining an 'inhuman' hyperrational eye on the abstractive fundamental concerns of sovereign and elite power; this is called, quite simply, raison d'état and has been an unnegatable theoretical (not to mention practical) factor in the study and exercise of power since the time of Machiavelli.
Terror has become a commodity in itself (a self-mintable currency of universal import and value), as has chaos. This is no more evident than in Syria-Iraq.
Al-Qaeda/ISIS mercenaries are fueled by trafficking and piracy, not religion. They are mafiosi working for a global mafiosi state, that is in fact the anti-state that rules that great expanse conformed by the untended and invaded countries of the world: fields of maximal and unimaginable criminality are too profitable and power-creating to not exist, they MUST exist in such a world as this.
This televisual farce belies any residual the claim that there is any animating democratic spirit left in the actually existing duopolistic American presidential electoral process.
There is no democracy in America. A gigantic neoconservative pincer movement is in operation, the purpose of which is to frighten and corral the American voters by causing (or at least have the cover of such a conceivable cause) them to feel existentially obligated to vote for Clinton contra the specter of a Putin-backed American proxy in the politically holographic (hollow) figure of Donald Trump, resulting in a Clinton presidential win (pseudo-democratic coup) as fait accompli (or the cover of the argument as such in the case of outright total electoral fraud).
Improvisationally or otherwise, the Brexit campaign was a coup for the most radical and buccaneering elements within Britain's reactionary oligarchy. Britain will now be both empire-less and Europe-less, set politically and institutionally adrift from the solidarity of concerted progressive and social democratic action in the political centers of an albeit neoliberal, yet essentially pacific, EU. A ship of foolish (i.e. fooled) Brexiters indisputably controlled by the most oligarchical faction of diminished Britain's neoliberal elite. The future, an identity-less post-modernized aircraft carrier of American hegemony on the North Atlantic, guarding Europe's Western door for the benefit of the latter, in other words, its gaoler/confiner against vitality, influence, and expansion in the North Atlantic region, perfidious bookend to the Ukraine's own American (bicephalic) satellitic function against the security of both Russia and EU. The loss of Britain and the "gain" of Ukraine are indisputable, perhaps fatal, disasters for the independent security of a unified Europe caught between a passive, but nuclear Russia, and an equally nuclear, but manifestly "preemptively" aggressive U.S.
"The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."--Nuremberg Trial Proceedings
"The Chilcot Report has rightly dug deep into the litany of failures of planning for the occupation, the calamitous decision to stand down the Iraqi army and to dissolve the Iraqi state.
"But the reality is it was the original decision to follow the US president into an unprovoked war in the most volatile region of the world and impose a colonial-style occupation that led to every other disaster."-- British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn
The pregnant lessons of Nuremberg were clearly not forgotten by the Bush and Blair governments, but nevertheless having been so scrupulously rejected they predictably, indeed with a reproducibility that eludes almost all other intrinsically chaotic mass undertakings of men, again birthed "the accumulated evil of the whole...not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect[ing] the whole world."
Brexit is real, Trump is fake. That's the difference between British and American democracy. Clinton will be the next president of the U.S., from which aerie she will be able to widely contemplate the chaos that she and the other "hawks" have wrought across the Greater Middle East region and beyond, and which for some time now has erosively been spilling, nay flooding over the EU, Russia, even into China. The disintegration of the Middle East nation state is both inversely and perversely reflected in the imperiled condition of the supranational European state, with the UK's defection from the latter being a most astonishing example of a perfect circularity of consequences: The Bushite-Blairite grand plan to transform (i.e. destabilize) and refashion the Middle East nation state in the image of an 'enlightened' neoliberal post- and supranational order may ultimately prove to be the concept that as praxis seeded the whirlwind that set in motion the collapse of the neoliberal pro-Nato EU suprastate edifice itself.
It strikes me the attacker was above all mentally ill. His terrorism claims were deeply intermixed with his illness, but to the extent he recognized his illness he likely ascribed it to the dysfunction of American society itself, perhaps even as a conspiratorially-directed attack against himself and others by unseen political forces.
It may also be that humdrum quotidian life had become secondary to him as he entered deeper and deeper into an Internet-enveloped fantasy world of psychosomatic dependence, which in itself was a sort of virtual medication for his dysphoric and depressive states. The Internet-filtered 'ontology' became more real, more directing, than actual reality, which either was the source of the dysphoria, or could do little to compete against the narcotic and palliating power against said dysphoria afforded by the Internet. The Internet, as a narcotizing agent-cum-source of information, afforded a toxic blend of narcotized or intensely psychosomaticized ideas, namely the subconscious desire to becoming permanently integrated into its now indispensable virtuality, an occurrence which could be 'materialized' through his own dematerialization, i.e. death, through a heinous yet socially (and perhaps even historically) significant traumatic event: i.e. an extremely high 'kill rate' attack tinged with potentially highly resonant and delineating political messaging. Indeed, as the killer was in the midst of his attack, it has been reported, he repeatedly checked Facebook and other online media for reflexive manifestations of his attack, yet the Internet was not simply a mirror of his acts, but the impulser of his feelings and thoughts, i.e the primary prism of his personal reality--his death during the unforgettably devastating attack would insure that his life would be 'uploaded' to the highest degree informationally and technologically possible onto the Internet, he would finally be fully integrated into his primary, most real, essential and necessary sphere of existence. He would lose his soul, according to normal human quotidian accounting, but enter the 'heaven' of an enveloping virtuality where everything was permissible, relative, and forgiven.
Perhaps they will have to start having to give these suicidal young men prizes not to go on murderous rampages, which offer them the 'prize' of posthumous notoriety.
As a secret demographic these men have the potential to hold America effectively hostage. The message sent through the chain of like phenomena is: 'If you treat me unfairly in a significant way, I am operatively free as an American to react in a massively damaging way, with an unforgettable vengeance equal to that of the ancient gods, I have the freedom to accumulate an arsenal sufficient to fulfill this threat, this promise!'
Neoliberalism having established a permanent regime of a labor and thus existential insecurity, especially for less well educated young men, a pattern seems to be becoming established whereby a minority of such men 'dare' to realize their fantasies of destroying such a system by attacking its unprotected innocent civilian underbelly. The acts are the most debased form of insanity, but the undeniable pattern has its own self-extensive message and logic, it is a story being written on an ever-extending wall of bloody and merciless executions motivated by the most denatured atavistic idealizations of male autonomous honor.
There are clearly no longer free presidential elections in America; Trump is a Potempkin candidate. As far as presidential elections are concerned, America is no longer a democracy.
Also, in the case of Turkey, it appears as though an Islamist intolerance for free inquiry, investigation, and analysis of religious texts and the social universe they seek to create, contain, and encapsulate must necessarily--for it is the same--result in political repression, to the gestural and symbolic level of even free academic and professional (as well as informal) discourse, ergo the arrests of prominent journalists of various political stripes.
How can anything, at least as far as foreign and military policy, that Obama says be believed when it has been amply demonstrated in academic studies that the U.S. is a plutocracy, ruled by private industries and Crassus-like individuals, and as such has frequently no insentives (quite the contrary) to truly inform its citizens regarding its true geopolitical aims and policies, their true effects and costs (in other words, the real human, sociopolitical, and environmental logic and economy of ongoing imperialism)?
Human beings will take pleasure from wherever they can find it, even, perhaps especially, from the barrel of a gun.
Perhaps this latest terrible and unreal incident was pleasurable fantasy disguised as vengeful indignation, the sort that likely eventually also fuels the psychopathy of the many young persons recruited or conscripted by ISIS.
These escalating series of events, in the case of Russia's involvement in Syria, suggest--an almost too neat of--a pattern headed in the direction of greater, more costly catastrophes for it in Syria and perhaps elswehere.
A prescient comment or was it that "plane" to see? : 'Tsar Peter I [Putin's favorite Russian leader - KR] used to say: "...don't trust a Turk..."
'Turkey has always, throughout history, played on the contradictions of the interests of Russia and the West. And the sudden concern of Erdogan about accidental trespassing of a Russian fighter jet into Turkish airspace from Syria should not be taken as NATO's sincerity. Such situations arise almost daily on all border territories worldwide. What can we say about those occasions, where there are military operations in those areas...'
http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/10/peter-great-used-to-say-never-trust-turk.html
Needless to say a situation of such great instability in Syria has only managed to attract regional and great powers into the melee, seeking geopolitical fortune and security in equal and inextricable measure. The downing of a Russian bomber jet by Turkey has great symbolic significance, of course, destroying along with the aircraft itself Russia's air of great power (direct) untouchability.
As concerns the most recent attacks in Paris, ISIS's alleged modus operandi of attacking young people congregating in cafes in a working-class neighborhood and a theatre seem almost willfully counterproductive to the stated claims of being motivated by Western airstrikes against civilians, and especially women and children, in Syria. During the Algerian War as well as during the French, and later American, wars in Indochina the opinion and democratic pressure of the citizenry, and most especially the youth, of the aforementioned Western powers served to curtail and uitimately end those wars to the benefit of the insurgent autochthonous/regional forces. Would it therefore not have made sense for ISIS/Daesh to have attempted something along similar political and strategic lines, i.e. the courting of the sympathy of the democratic forces, and especially the youth populations of the Western countries in question, considering their claimed purposes of seeking a cessation of Western aggression and intervention in the regions they control/seek to control? The democratic and intellectual response in France to the Algerian War, and in the U.S. to the Vietnam War, arguably made the aforesaid countries more democratic, pliable, and responsive to their citizens, while the ongoing and ever-intensifying so-called 'wars on terror' threaten to make all the countries that engage in such wars much less so.
"And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival."--George Orwell
"Nous sommes en guerre!"--President Hollande
War, and, above all, state-sanctioned war, has almost always been bad news for democracy. Without the great state-sanctioned wars of the twentieth century the major countries of the West would all have been egalitarian democracies by now.
" The President had accepted the finding of the Department of Justice that all ISIS fighters were unlawful combatants not subject to Geneva Convention protections. They were like pirates of old, and piracy was stamped out only when governments began hanging them."
http://gawker.com/army-mans-erotic-tale-about-isis-is-this-years-greatest-1743257200
Mark my words, Russia will indirectly be blamed for this: "they intervened in Syria and as a consequence things escalated terribly, the world is now an indisputably more dangerous place because of Putin's Syrian hubris and folly."
I submit to you that "quantum politics" has already become a reality and that the two candidates of the only televised parties become quantumly entangled with each other and with the greater public; it is this very literal quantum entanglement which actually determines the results of presidential electoral debates and, if the democracy true, the result of the election.
On the topic of the recent ‘Islamist terrorist plot’ in Texas: it is my impression that AFDI was provoking insane people who happened to consider themselves Muslims. The religiously-mad and the amorously-mad have much in common in this regard as both are wont to claim that another person has power over their life, over their ability to live/die, on the basis of certain idiosyncratically volatilizing words, etc., to which the aggrieved responds: “If you leave me I will die,” “If you leave me I will die and so will you,” “If you leave me we both will die but will be united in heaven!;” “If you draw this image you will die,” “If you draw this image I will die too,” “If you draw this image we both will die and I will be rewarded with love in heaven!”
Provoking demented people, whose mania involves an obsession with the gorier aspects of Islamic history, is of a larger well-established genre, one whose common (and dangerous) dynamics frequently implicate a topic that has come to mark an age, to the level of mania, with the most literally susceptible to mania responding as literal maniacs, i.e. illogically, impetuously, and often violently, without regard to their own or others’ well-being. Most people only come closest to encountering such dynamics, if at all, in sexual-affective relationships; but if one indefatigably seeks them out and sticks one’s neck out in a superfluity of other contexts (especially in those that have been mediatized ad nauseam and naturally have come to populate the imaginations of the already insane) one will not fail to find them.
As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek recently commented in the New Statesman, the Islamism that is confronting Europe, of course the Middle East, and elsewhere, is itself a product of modernity (colonialism, disenfranchisement, neoliberalism, etc.) and not one of Koranic orthodoxy (so that it is inessential to the germ of the text) and is manifesting itself very similarly, in terms of heretofore unseen degrees of violence, in Libya to Syria to Mexico to Central America to Brazil to South Africa, etc. What connects all these fracturing/fully-fractured societies is, besides the fundamental damage caused by historical Western colonialism, their tensive and consequently explosive unpreparedness before the (supposedly neutralizing) relativity of neoliberal modernity (in all its vertiginous social, sexual, etc., individualizing difference). What was more subtly accrued in a West defined by its significant Middle Class is being far more precipitously (and we are seeing disastrously) imposed on far poorer, more traditional, patriarchal, ‘honor’-type societies (which are of course not limited to Islamic countries, vide historically caste-defined countries of Latin America and India). So this explosive phenomenon of ‘Islamist terrorism’ is simply the most dramatic manifestation of the more general phenomenon of hyper-imposed neoliberal modernity on societies too poor and too traditional to withstand it without experiencing an explosive ressentiment which is later twisted and disfigured by the factories of neoliberal ideology into ‘centralities’ that are in fact tangential to the actual source and essence of the destructive phenomenon.
The hegemon recognizes no limits on specific actions of its power, but what is truly worse is the incognizance/indifference of the citizenry of such a vast power (ostensibly democratic), especially relative to civic consciences of its cohorts in other advanced Western democratic countries--but then this is the power of ideology, and the American political oligarchy like no other.
This Der Spiegel article on the "secret files" of the Islamic State (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html) certainly has more of the ring of truth than the Atlantic's article of a month ago. The surprise is that the paradoxes, contradictions, and very seemingly (even before this revelatory article) Machiavellian, secular, and criminal underpinnings of the organization weren't deemed more apparent and probable by the MSM than the tales ISIS self-servingly told of itself, an organization that, through its facility with mass murder, more resembles SS Einsatzgruppen, than one permeated and inspired at its highest levels by a Koranic enlightenment (an absurd association on the very face of it). In short, the Islamic state strikes one as having far more in common 'subcutaneously' to Mexican cartels barbarously occupying (exploiting, terrorizing) entire cities and even states than to a genuine revolutionary force (if by revolutionary one understands a movement motivated by the implementation of a genuine alternate Idea, in the Platonic sense, of the constitution of society).
P.S. " ...the embassy is virtually an armed camp, rather than being a window on American for locals or a place from which US diplomats can get to know local society." The same can be said, with hardly any guilt of exaggeration, of American consulates/interests in certain important, even key Mexican cities.
The psychology at work with groups (i.e. the individuals they indoctrinate) such as ISIS is to use religion (in this case, of course, Islam) to justify rapine and rape and therefore add a layer of deceptive and distortive righteous outrage to their piratical appropriation of what they had no hand in building or preserving. Such rapacity characterizes, in a more sophisticated form, the plunder of economies and polities by globalized financial industries (inextricable from the global drug trade and other illicit and antisocial activities), but also that of many ancient Roman usurper emperors, who, having bloodily achieved power, would establish themselves as the center of a renewed imperial cult and proceed to terrorize, rob, and murder arbitrarily or systematically, but always with an assumed (though often self-convinced) zealous righteousness born of innate or engendered psychopathy given sustenance and coherence by the technologies of ideology. Chaos was inserted into the Middle East not by Islam, which abhors it, but by Western imperialism which has never overcome its fascination with the Caesarean strategy of 'divide et impera.'
Clearly ISIS is an extraordinary anti-nationalist force hell-bent on destroying the historic particularities of particular Arab nations, this decimation of regional cultural identities can only benefit those state actors with pretensions to regional hegemony: namely Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States (which are zealously anti-Iraqi), and Israel. Seemingly the intent is to create a civilizational wasteland constituting Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and a significant portion of Iran. Leaving only Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, and Israel as masters of such an post-Arab-nationalist apocalypse.
Methinks this is largely sophistry on Giuliani's part, this man is not unintelligent and so what he does is calculated in so far as it constitutes bland psychologizing as opposed to arguments characterized by analytical rigor--for such qualities would in themselves be informative and constructively emulatable and therefore truly popularly empowering and therefore communistic-seeming and thus obscene to elements of the elite, so that in its very vacuity of content Giuliani's position embodies anti-democratic obscurantism and deception, while Obama's is a style that never quite fully surrenders itself in its self-hypnotic fervor to the aforementioned obscurantism, incuriosity, and willful credulity of a Giuliani or even a Hillary.
Philosopher Alain Badiou’s recent comments on the topic: “The world is subject to the ruling international oligarchy and enslaved to the abstraction of money – the only recognised universal…A mediocre intellectual conformism has established itself…– a both plaintive and complacent form of resignation that goes hand in hand with the lack of any future. Any future, that is, other than rolling out what already exists in repetitive fashion.
“And now we see the emergence of its counterpart. This is a logical and horrifying reaction, a hopeless and fatal one, a mix of corrupt capitalism and murderous gangsterism. Giving subjective form to the death drive, it maniacally retreats into the most varied identities. This identitarian retreat in turn sparks arrogant, identitarian counter-identities.
The general plot of this story is the West – homeland of the dominant, civilised capitalism – clashing with ‘Islamism’ – the reference point of bloody terrorism. Appearing against this backdrop we have, on the one hand, murderous armed gangs or individuals with stockpiles of their own, which they wave around in order to force everyone to honour the corpse of some deity; on the other hand, savage international military expeditions mounted in the name of human rights and democracy, which destroy entire states (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Mali, the Central African Republic…). These wars have thousands of victims, and they never achieve anything more than negotiating a precarious peace with the worst bandits in order to secure the oil fields, mines, food resources and enclaves where big business can prosper.”
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1833-the-red-flag-and-the-tricolore-by-alain-badiou
This view coincides with the one predicted by American geopolitical strategist Philip Bobbitt a few years ago: “Terrorism in the era of the market state will reflect the nature of the market state” since contemporary terrorism is itself an outgrowth of “the transition from nation states to market states.”
The paradoxical particulars of the ISIS economy reflect this: “Where does Islamic State get its money? In an interview, terrorism expert Louise Shelley says it operates like a run-of-the-mill crime syndicate in which ideology takes a back seat to money making.” There is apparently little they will not traffic in, least of all pornography.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/terror-expert-shelley-speaks-of-islamic-state-business-model-a-1011492.html
ISIS’s whole operation seems to be a particularly pestilential and attritive form of capitalism–akin to the one adopted by the narcocracies of Mexico and beyond.
All these terrorist acts in the name of Islam establish an unhealthy debt between the vast majority of normal Muslims residing in Western countries and the non-Muslim native population, or the significant portion of the latter, which up to the present time has made the effort to go through the cognitive process of rightly concluding that, as individuals, the great majority of Muslims would never act in the terroristic ways of the recent, demented attackers who use Islam pretextually to carry out what are in fact nihilistic acts of violence. Inversely, these terroristic acts very likely also have the effect of discouraging and dampening the protestive spirit of sizable numbers within said Muslim immigrant population, who, if not for the Islam-connected attacks in the heart of Europe, would find no unseemly complications/strategic hindrances to the organization of more frequent protests against a revived and catastrophic Western imperialism in the Middle East and in much of the Islamic world in general.
The man was insane, indeed, seemingly possessed. He would see the two women, and the combination of their comely features and pious hijabs drove him to an apoplexy which such an unreflective creature as he could never possibly have recognized or understood. And so he walked mindlessly, gun in hand, to murder because his own doom did not matter or even occur to him. Such is the insanity of true visceral hate.
Guantanamo is a Mengelian experimentation camp designed to torture both innocent human beings and the American constitution, they do not want it closed nor any of the prisoners freed because they are not finished with the experimentations, quite the contrary, the point is to see just how much torture, incremental or intensive, Americans' civil liberties, international human rights, and the American constitution itself can endure before finally expiring.
I posted this the night before the attack on another website, but I think it acquires an additional, terrible significance and meaning after the fact: "Houellebecq is sincere when he says that Western civilization is hollow to its core and only Islam can save it, his is a truly intelligent, radical, and prescient (indeed alchemical or kabbalistic) response to that gargantuan, continent-sized malaise that, for example, (and here lies the crux of the controversy) Breivik was also responding to, but while the latter would and could only transform himself into a blood-soaked caricature (though quite actually “demon” possessed) of a Dostoevskian “underground” or “superfluous” man, Houellebecq has the capacity, which is above all a creative ability, to resort to the relative equanimity, the sangfroid, the intuition (which is a sort of purity despite all) of the genuine artist, and this makes the transformative possibilities of his impulses, the “eppur-si-muove” power of his vision, all the more actual and existent, because it has not been exhausted, aborted, or made monstrous by self-destruction or destruction of the other."
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/houellebecq-submission/#post-comments
“Une caricature sanglante” of Islam made monstrously literal at Charlie Hebdo?
They would love to do the same to Iran, permanently and irrevocably.
The Soviet Union sought to destroy religion while the CIA and its world associate governments have succeeded in perverting it, especially Islam, to point where it has become not the religion of an ancient prophet but that of Dostoevskian anarchism and possession, a perpetual motion machine of terroristic repetition ad nauseam (an eternal return of insanity), a mise-en-abyme of imperial pretextuality for war and intervention abroad.
The CIA believes in the efficacy of the psychology of rape, in the transformative effect, if you will, in the case of men, of anal rape. Is this homophobic primitive psychologizing on the part of the CIA, or this there genuine scientific substance to the transformative psychological effect, to its ability to alter a personality, to make it more pliant, controlable and to effect a dissolution of personality, in the case of men and in ways that other forms of torture and psychological manipulation cannot?
*correction: "due to manifest..."
The American ruling class may be described as enraptured by the visions and the ‘religion’ of neoliberalism–that metaphysical ideal of a universally realized and permeating American ‘empire of the mind,’ that takes as its existential model technology itself, obviously especially the more advanced militaristic, telecommunicational, and computational. Consequently, when it should be thinking historically, diplomatically, anthropologically, it instead thinks in concepts taken directly from computational and communicational models: to wit, the Internet, cybernetics, advanced telematics, artificial intelligence. As a consequence the lived ‘real’ becomes even more subsumed and subordinate to the metaphysical figurations of a determinative technological futurity that may itself end up being no more than a historical fetish, one of the many to which highly ideological systems, such as the American, are chronically, perhaps constitutionally, susceptible to (the wars in the Middle East and the meddling in Ukraine, which even Foreign Affairs magazine has come out against, may perhaps be seen as other fallaciously-grounded instances of this).
A neoliberal union of fragmented and downsized Arab and 'post-Iranian' states constellated around the principal regional satellites of American hegemony: Israel and Saudi Arabia? In other words, a Nato and EU-like military and politico-economic Middle Eastern superstructure as imposed 'teleological finish line' of a CIA-midwifed Thirty Years War-type socially and constitutionally reorganizing process? Former Czech president Vaclav Klaus speaks of something similar, to be sure, when he says: ‘I’m not just criticising the EU arrangements — at the same time I’m very critical of global governance and the shift to transnationalism. A week ago I was in Hong Kong and I criticised the naive opening up of countries without keeping or maintaining the anchoring of the nation state. Doing this leads either to anarchy, or to global governance. My vision for Europe is a Europe of sovereign nation states, definitely. But we have already gone well beyond simply economic integration. The EU is a post-democratic and post-political system.’ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9322652/europe-needs-systemic-change/
"Both Sunni and Shia states are threatened by the IS. We must find a way, through imaginative and adept diplomacy, to so triangulate these relationships that both Iran and her clients, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states that feel threatened by Iran, come to rely on the power of out-of-area countries like the US and the UK to reassure them about each other and against their common foe." http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/philip-bobbitt-the-west-must-look-beyond-the-use-of-force-alone-9757353.html
And is this not precisely the crux of the matter and the meaning of the implication: the sustained reliance by the region on an external, 'levitating' organizational military power, perhaps one patterned on NATO but with, at least incipiently, Anglo-American (and perhaps later Israeli-Saudi as well) control and command. Will ISIS and the looming danger of yet unborn ISISes be the form taken by the path that leads to the market-statal, indeed supra-statal 'domestication' of the region for the global neoliberal order? Is ISIS, as suggests Australia's highest ranking military General David Morrison, citing Clinton foreign policy strategist Philip Bobbitt's concept of the 'long war,' a perhaps teologically necessary phase and facet in the ulimate constitutional reorganization of the region along market-statal, post-nationalist, hegemonically supra-statal lines? http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/army-chief-predicts-a-long-war-as-us-and-arab-states-hit-is-in-syria-20140923-10l1nt.html
The execrableness of the policy lies of course in the displaced and dead hundreds of thousands, principally in Near Asia and the Middle East consequent to hegemonic attempts at resource control and the optative emasculation of statal rivals. But, ultimately the operating vision is one of an “empire of the mind,” whereby American imperialism qua mental state (in the dual or triple senses of the phrase) incessantly expands, colonizes, Ebola-like, the mental territories of billions of human minds with the psychological and even somatic patterns and dynamics that sustain this virtual ever-replicating, mise-en-abyming empire that rather thinks it has lifted itself by virtue of the conceptual and technological into the deterritorialized sphere of the Internetic “cloud” and beyond. The question is will this true “empire of lies” have fully engulfed us within it before we could become aware of its systemically contradictory demise, and/or will the psychosis of infinitely mirrored and mirroring lies have irreversibly trespassed and transferred our human consciences into a new and irrevocable transhuman state, in line with the robotic, cybernetic, and in general the technologico-economic: the singular, unitary, and ontologically anti-communal? Isolated in a shared hell of permanently damaged inhumanity?
A society run by "Guardians" is perhaps the least guarded of all when it comes to outside manipulation.
l'Espresso: "...because Isis fanatics are the perfect demonstration that our democracies are in mortal danger?"
Julian Assange: "Our democracies are in mortal danger as a result of mass surveillance-enabled totalitarian government: one dominant power faction seizing nearly every significant form of economic and social interaction." http://espresso.repubblica.it/internazionale/2014/09/15/news/assange-google-should-be-of-concern-to-people-all-over-the-world-1.180095
It's obvious that the U.S. does not view itself as limited by international law, certainly in cases where its supposed national security is concerned (was the assassination of Bin Laden consonant with such law?). As the world's most powerful nation it is also the freest to disregard such international strictures; no doubt many other countries would prefer the reality, if not the impropriety, of such relatively illimited operational license.
But where is the evidence that "Russia is...desperately afraid of ISIL...and happy enough that the US had decided to intervene against it"? ISIS is indifferentiable (despite what much--but not all--of the U.S. policy establishment has said), as there is nothing uniquely ominous about it, being as it is but a manifestation of a far more monstrous and indomitable condition: that of the multi-operative dynamics of ethnic and sectarian survival and destruction "atavized" and energized by prolonged "a-statality." The perception of a necessity of prolonging and (at least episodically) intensifying attritional disorder, by powers external and regional, is the true ominous force haunting the region. ISIS's "degradation," even to the point of nullity, would not in itself resolve or transform such an underlying perniciously anti-human reality, having, as it has, been crescendoed by what has become an oscillative and self-dynamizing force of factors and not by one simplistically self-determining/fate-mastering actor. Other "ISISes" would soon form and occupy the critical void of Iraq's Babylonian plain unless the statal dynamic is permanently transformed in the "Shia Crescent." And is this not precisely the real "desperate" fear of Russia's, that the U.S. will use the pretext of an ephemerality such as ISIS to permanently remove the few non-hegemonically allied bloc(k)s, i.e. Syria and Iran, impeding its triumviral strategy (with Israel and Saudi Arabia) in the region? As Kissinger recently expressed: " Iran [has] the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire...From a geo-strategic point of view, I consider Iran a bigger problem than ISIS." Conspicuously he did not say anything about Russia, or even Iran, perceiving ISIS as a "problem" commensurate with a "geo-strategic, permanent reality." But rather that the aforesaid were concerned with extending or preserving their territorial "patrimony" from the grasp of the U.S (and, by extension, those in its camp and under its shield). http://www.npr.org/2014/09/06/346114326/henry-kissingers-thoughts-on-the-islamic-state-ukraine-and-world-order
“The model for world order that Mr. Kissinger repeatedly returns to is the so-called Westphalian peace, negotiated in Europe at the end of the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48 at a time when conditions in Europe, he says, roughly approximated those of the contemporary world: 'a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to defeat all the others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal practices, in search of neutral rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict.'" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/books/in-world-order-henry-kissinger-sums-up-his-philosophy.html?_r=0
In the present case these decidedly unneutral "rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict” would be essential to the prolongation of declining hegemony by enabling the affected erstwhile superpower to amplify or magnify its remaining politico-economic “weight” via the appropriation or, at the very least, parasitization and instrumentalization of new and existing regional and global nexuses of military and economic power–with extortionary threats of controlled terror, chaos, and regime change serving as the stick and an “equitable” partage with sufficiently “right thinking” and emulative world oligarchies as the carrot.
In short, the U.S. seeks to "robotize" global interdependence (i.e. make of it an articulated and controllable carapace) in order to amplify the force of its diminishing hegemony.
[Corrected version] It appears that the strategy being followed involves the creation of a Thirty Years’ War-type of destructive-constructive dialectic culminating in the fragmentation of the major independent, non-aligned (with the American lead market-state system) states and powers in the Middle East. In the place of large nationalist, powerfully rivalrous regional states would be created ethnic/sectarian client statelets a la the Gulf States, militarily independently impotent. These permanently manageable non-nationalist, non-ambitious (militarily), almost thoroughly subjacent entities would of course necessarily form part of larger military and economic discipline-imposing zones and organizations: a Middle Eastern “Nato”-type alliance lead by the U.S./Saudi Arabia/Israel and of course a European Union-type neoliberal (or “market state”) economic bloc. In such a way and through such horrendous “birthing pangs” a (religio-culturally) “post-medieval” and (politically) post cold war-nationalist Middle East would arise, one finally approximating Europe, East Asia, and North America in its religio-cultural post-modernity and market-determined political “consensus,” albeit with a stronger residual flavoring of religiously-derived social conformity, a la Japan’s. The risks for the strategists of this longue durée scenario: a thoroughly demoralized, anarchized, and criminalized neocolonial society reminiscent of Central America’s and of other parts of Latin America.
Predictive/imposed determinism translates (for the purposes of the NSA) into a regime of political and economic unidimensionality over the entirety of the world and over all the human individuals contained within it; it is a subject that is amply documented in academic sources, and yet there is hardly any mention of it in Wikileaks' entire archives. On the other hand, predictive analytics/determinism forms the very substance of and the basis for the Snowden revelations; how to explain the yawning discrepancy between the paucity of testimony of predictive/imposed determinism in the Wikileaks archives on the one hand, and its overwhelming corroboration, indeed instantiation, by Snowden's NSA-centered revelations on the other?
How is it possible, more specifically, for American authorities in the White House, State, Pentagon and elsewhere to say with a straight face that ISIS is ""Beyond anything we've seen" and by implication that as far as their predictive analytics are concerned it was an inconceivable development, when, for example, Philip Bobbitt seems to have very much anticipated the development of such terroristic "market states" in his book 'Terror and Consent'? And, in turn, how is it possible for the press to accept such astounding and astoundingly profuse professions of institutional blindness, unpreparedness, and ineptness without nary a published and credited remark of incredulity or skepticism?
ISIS is interestingly, and in contrast to many traditional insurgent and terrorist groups, symbolic of a recrudescence of capitalism and not a revolutionary break from of it. It neither practically nor ideologically rejects capitalism, indeed, through its combination of marauding brigandage, opportunistic and indiscriminate mercantilism (e.g. clandestine trafficking), and rational usurpation and utilization of preexisting resources and infrastructures it conspicuously embodies an extreme form of it. Such a form was predictively described by American foreign policy strategist Philip Bobbitt as a terroristic reflection of the emerging capitalist market state itself (which exists for the “maximization of opportunities” for economic expansion in contrast to nation states’ promise of improvements in mass material well-being): “Terrorism in the era of the market state will reflect the nature of the market state. It will be decentralised, disseminated via the internet, and threaten the use of WMD and germ warfare…It could come from a number of other sources…and when it does come the potential for disaster will be extreme.” Indeed, the aforesaid makes the claim that “the primary driver of terrorism is not Islam but the emergence of market states (like the U.S…)”. Perhaps the intentionality behind such “primary” drives is more direct and concerted than the author would care to admit.
"... draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents - tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun." ---Noam Chomsky describing a deserter's account of the training received by CIA-backed Salvadoran death squads http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html
In a recent widely cited Atlantic interview Clinton said: "[ISIS] were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming." http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/?single_page=true
However, ousted Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki said "Intelligence apparatuses [are] behind the sectarian strife in the region." http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-14/iraqs-maliki-steps-down-stop-bloodshed-supports-abadi-new-prime-minister This is indicative of ongoing CIA and MI6 involvement and fostering of ISIS (UK/US special forces are now overtly there http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2724384/British-American-special-forces-lightning-mission-Mount-Sinjar-Troops-land-say-plans-airlift-Yazidi-refugees-far-likely-ground-assessment.html) and consequently complicity in the current mass humanitarian crisis in Syria/Iraq; with U.S. humanitarian airdrops over Mt. Sinjar being nothing but a distractive sop to cover their responsibility in the mass uprooting of hundreds of thousands from the local population in a continuing strategic ploy to wipe the Iraq slate clean and further the creation of a “New Middle East” characterized by human/social uprootedness and helplessness and corporate/hegemonic emplacement, extraction, and exploitation--that is, a new inhuman order in the region devoid of all substantive logic except the imperio-capitalist. (i.e. radical "free" market statism) http://www.globalresearch.ca/plans-for-redrawing-the-middle-east-the-project-for-a-new-middle-east/3882 http://carnegieendowment.org/2008/02/25/new-middle-east/2y94?reloadFlag=1
Agreed, it's like the whole world has been engulfed in a bad espionage novel.
Iraq is an extended American atrocity on the order of Stalinism's great crimes.
Obama's cynicism is too inept, too transparent--not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the magician has no wand.
IS, despite its anarchically fearless appearance, would of course never think of attacking Turkey, or Jordan, or Israel; it strikes as being a principally anti-Iranian creature/machine.
It's being talked about openly now: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/01/the-blogger-who-offered-an-argument-for-palestinian-genocide.html
Israel has from the first seen Palestinians as comparable to Native Americans who must be expelled or eliminated as they were expected to resist Israeli colonization (as all natives would)--this in the words of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, one of the Zionist founders of Irgun.
The Israeli state project from the first has been both exclusionary and revolutionary: to create and maintain a majoritarian Jewish state that has the social and economic dynamism of the most advanced countries of the West, but while the latter have become inclusive and multi-cultural to the point of being nearly post-majoritarian, Israel perceives this same possibility as an existential threat that must contradictorily be countered by the incessant and spiraling revolutionary force of Western extra-limitality in the service of a prophetic, Babylonian-era identity. Such schizophrenia writ large to the level of atomically-armed national identity cannot realistically be viewed as anything other than the most maladaptive madness, considering the insolubly obstructive demographic and sectarian realities of the region--there can be no return to the Israeli empire of 1000 BCE, except, it seems, in the exclusionary yet hegemonic teleology of Israel's present leaders and planners.
Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote in his 1923 essay "The Iron Wall":
"We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism.
Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.
That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible. And we are all of us, without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power, should carry out this task vigorously and with determination. In this matter there is no difference between our "militarists" and our "vegetarians". Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.
We all demand that there should be an iron wall. Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about "agreement" which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. Empty rhetoric of this kind is dangerous. And that is why it is not only a pleasure but a duty to discredit it and to demonstrate that it is both fantastic and dishonest." (http://www.jabotinsky.org/multimedia/upl_doc/doc_191207_49117.pdf)
Switch the British with the Americans and add the Iron Dome to the "Iron Wall" and we have the present state of things in uncompensated occupied Palestine.
Netanyahu's "terror tunnels" are certainly real: they are the tunnels bored by his psychological warfare into the minds of a world and especially an Israeli audience; they are the infliction of visual terror on the world through the images of indiscriminate, violent, and effective state impunity, and among its calculated effects is the frustration and demoralization of emotionally and ethically-sensible people everywhere, of those millions who still believe in universal humanitarian ideals--this very much warlike regime apparently wishes to shock us out of that "illusion."
This can only be judged to be a genocidal war against the disprotected poor (the U.N. is no protection). These are state massacres against concentrations of essentially stateless people under the cover of fighting terrorism and asymmetrical aggression. The existence of violent “defenders” of stateless camps and dispossessed ghettoes (e.g. Hamas) can of course only ultimately benefit an established nation-state bent on a pre-decided/opportunistic genocidal solution to extraneous populations on its borders (with the assumption that the reigning international climate is one of de facto permissibility/self-interested collusion or selective anarchy).
The U.S. is in no way a sort of neutral Platonic state without base and mundane (including 'subterranean') interests. One must apply one's skepticism realistically (which is not to say binarily or even with axiomatic impartiality/neutrality), the advancement of geopolitical power over adversaries and 'allies' alike is what is at play here (in this sinister event) and in a default generality, humanitarian concerns and publicly circulating notions of 'justice' are employed by states principally to dress and address events in formulaic and Manichean cliches that promote geostrategic aims in publicly acceptable/intelligible fashion, all the while maintaining an 'inhuman' hyperrational eye on the abstractive fundamental concerns of sovereign and elite power; this is called, quite simply, raison d'état and has been an unnegatable theoretical (not to mention practical) factor in the study and exercise of power since the time of Machiavelli.
Terror has become a commodity in itself (a self-mintable currency of universal import and value), as has chaos. This is no more evident than in Syria-Iraq.
Al-Qaeda/ISIS mercenaries are fueled by trafficking and piracy, not religion. They are mafiosi working for a global mafiosi state, that is in fact the anti-state that rules that great expanse conformed by the untended and invaded countries of the world: fields of maximal and unimaginable criminality are too profitable and power-creating to not exist, they MUST exist in such a world as this.