Connexion
‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.’
King Henry V, 1415, the Hundred Years War.
By Pepe Escobar at Strategic Culture Foundation.
The Mechanism: how the “order” based on made-up rules is descending into savagery
As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday, taking Lord Ismay’s motto to ever soaring heights (“keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing as Secretary-General came up with a merry “initiative” to create a 100 billion euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.
Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial exit of the Hegemon – already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas, all in deep debt and most mired in recession.
A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO’s HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero leverage to raise money among member states.
After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60 billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress – and it won’t – no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered within the industrial-military complex.
Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing, actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military presence in Ukraine – or country 404; something that is already a fact on the ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: “Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct confrontation”).
Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the Hegemon’s aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable heights – the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by the “leaders” of the Global North.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the biblical psychopathology entity “intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”
The “logic” behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza. Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical doctors, patients and dozens of children.
Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated the Vienna convention – something that even the historical Nazis never did – striking Iran’s consular mission/ambassador’s residence in Damascus.
This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers, and a total of 10 people.
Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran. Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.
The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this, over and over again?
The sinews of Liberal Totalitarianism
Four years ago, at the start of what I later qualified as the Raging Twenties, we were beginning to watch the consolidation of an intertwined series of concepts defining a new paradigm. We were becoming familiar with notions such as circuit breaker; negative feedback loop; state of exception; necropolitics; and hybrid neofascism.
As the decade marches on, our plight may at least have been alleviated by a twin glimmer of hope: the drive towards multipolarity, led by the Russia-China strategic partnership, with Iran playing a key part, and all that coupled with the total breakdown, live, of the “rules-based international order”.
Yet to affirm there will be a long and winding road ahead is the Mother of All Euphemisms.
So, to quote Bowie, the ultimate late, great aesthete: Where Are We Now? Let’s take this very sharp analysis by the always engaging Fabio Vighi at Cardiff University and tweak it a little further.
Anyone applying critical thinking to the world around us can feel the collapse of the system. It’s a closed system alright, easily definable as Liberal Totalitarianism. Cui bono? The 0.0001%.
Nothing ideological about that. Follow the money. The defining negative feedback loop is actually the debt loop. A criminally anti-social mechanism kept in place by – what else – a psychopathology, as acute as the one exhibited by the biblical genocidals in West Asia.
The Mechanism is enforced by a triad.
1. The transnational financial elite, the superstars of the 0.0001%.
2. Right beneath it, the politico-institutional layer, from the U.S. Congress to the European Commission (EC) in Brussels, as well as comprador elite “leaders” across the Global North and South.
3. The former “intelligentsia”, now essentially hacks for hire from media to academia.
This institutionalized hyper-mediatization of reality is (italics mine), in fact, The Mechanism.
It’s this mechanism that controlled the merging of the pre-fabricated “pandemic” – complete with hardcore social engineering sold as “humanitarian lockdowns” – into, once again, Forever Wars, from Project Genocide in Gaza to the Russophobia/cancel culture obsession inbuilt in Project Proxy War in Ukraine.
That’s the essence of Totalitarian Normality: the Project for Humanity by the appallingly mediocre, self-appointed Great Reset “elites” of the collective West.
Killing them softly with AI
A key vector of the whole mechanism is the direct, vicious interconnection between a tecno-military euphoria and the hyper-inflationary financial sector, now in thrall with AI.
Enter, for instance, AI models such as ‘Lavender’, tested on the ground in the Gaza killing field lab. Literally: artificial intelligence programming the extermination of humans. And it’s happening, in real time. Call it Project AI Genocide. — Sidebar: [01] [02] [03] [04] [background]
Another vector, already experimented, is inbuilt in the indirect assertion by toxic EC Medusa Ursula von der Lügen: essentially, the need to produce weapons as Covid vaccines.
That’s at the core of a plan to use funding of the EU by European taxpayers to “increase financing” of “joint contracts for weapons”. That’s an offspring of von der Lügen’s push to roll out Covid vaccines – a gigantic Pfizer-linked scam for which she is about to be investigated and arguably exposed by the EU’s Public Prosecutor Office. In her own words, addressing the proposed weapons scam: “We did this for vaccines and gas.”
Call it Weaponization of Social Engineering 2.0.
Amidst all the action in this vast corruption swamp, the Hegemon agenda remains quite blatant: to keep its – dwindling – predominantly thalassocratic, military hegemony, no matter what, as the basis for its financial hegemony; protect the U.S. dollar; and protect those unmeasurable, unpayable debts in U.S. dollars.
And that brings us to the tawdry economic model of turbo-capitalism, as sold by collective West media hacks: the debt loop, virtual money, borrowed non-stop to deal with “autocrat” Putin and “Russian aggression”. That’s a key by-product of Michael Hudson’s searing analysis of the FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) syndrome.
Ouroboros intervenes: the serpent bites its own tail. Now the inherent folly of The Mechanism is inevitably leading casino capitalism to resort to barbarism. Undiluted savagery – of the Crocus City Hall kind and of the Project Gaza Genocide kind.
And that’s how The Mechanism engenders institutions – from Washington to Brussels to hubs across the Global North to genocidal Tel Aviv – stripped down to the status of psychotic killers, at the mercy of Big Finance/FIRE (oh, such fabulous seafront real estate opportunities available in “vacant” Gaza.)
How can we possibly escape such folly? Will we have the will and the discipline to follow Shelley’s vision and, in “this dim vast vale of tears”, summon the transcending Spirit of Beauty – and harmony, equanimity and justice?
Jon Elmer of the Electronic Intifada with his weekly update, focused on guerrilla war around Al Shifa Hospital. Kevork Almassian, originally from Aleppo, Syria, reviews the Anglo-Zionists’ return to bombing Aleppo in coordination with Al-Qaeda, Jordan, and the US base at Al Tanf; back to the sordid future! Does a criminal ever deviate far from a favored MO? Will it matter in the end, as during the last decade?
The trade corridor amounts to active Arab collusion in the genocidal war
By Abdel Bari Atwan at Rai Al Youm
While Yemen gets pummelled by US and British airstrikes for trying to close the Red Sea to Israeli shipping, other Arab countries have been conspiring to sabotage its valiant effort to support the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have been complicit in creating a Dubai-Haifa corridor to provide the occupation state with an alternative route for its commerce that bypasses the Bab al-Mandeb strait and Suez Canal or Gulf of Aqaba.
The countries involved have maintained a deafening silence about, or muttered feeble excuses for, this shameful and ominous normalisation move amid Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip. But the Israeli media haven’t been shy about publicising and hailing it. They’ve shown footage of convoys of freight trucks passing through this route, thereby exposing what the Arab governments are trying to hide from their people.
Last week, Israel’s Channel 13 reported that hundreds of lorries loaded with goods and fresh food have been making their way from the UAE through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to the occupation state and its consumers. This amounts to active collusion, even if indirect, in Israel’s murderous war of extermination in the Gaza Strip.
The Jordanian authorities already committed the outrage of enabling the export of fruits and vegetables from the Jordan Valley to the occupation state despite its assault. Now, some officials are arguing that Jordan does not have the right to prevent the transit of commercial freight through its territory due to the agreements it has signed in this regard and out of fear of being treated in kind by the countries that would suffer from such a decision, namely Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
But since when has Israel ever complied with the provisions of signed agreements or respected other laws and treaties, not least the Wadi Araba and Oslo accords?
It is disgraceful that an Emirati company, Puretrans, is partnering the Israeli firm Trucknet in jointly overseeing the management of this corridor. Supplying Israel and its settlers with goods and food while it deliberately starves more than two million Palestinians in its attempt to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable amounts to direct participation in that crime.
The Egyptian authorities are doing the same by refusing to open the Rafah crossing by force to allow humanitarian aid to enter, and by charging levies of up to $5,000 on each truck. According to news reports, there are over 2,500 trucks stalled in a 40-km long queue stretching from Arish to the Rafah crossing waiting to deliver aid.
One would have expected the Arab governments complicit in this crime to apply reciprocal treatment by shutting down all crossings to Israel completely, not to mention severing relations with it and closing its embassies on their territory in solidarity with the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They could at least condition the transit of freight through the Dubai-Haifa corridor on Israel lifting the blockade and allowing aid into Gaza.
But that seems too much to hope for. If the killing of more than 30,000 fellow Arabs (thousands of them still buried under the rubble), the injury of some 70,000 others, and the destruction of 86% of Gazan homes does not stir the feelings or consciences of these governments, what can?
We’re not asking Jordan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to take the same valiant stance as the Yemenis and confront the US and UK warships trying to break the maritime blockade on Israel. We know they would turn a deaf ear to any such demand. But we do ask them to listen to their people who are seething over this feigned impotence, and follow the lead of non-Arab and non-Muslim countries like South Africa, Bolivia, Chile, and Colombia in severing ties with the occupation state instead of throwing it a lifeline.
The Jordanian people are in an unprecedented and mounting state of agitation these days, first over the massacre of their brethren in Gaza and the West Bank, and second over reports of Jordanian planes joining US aircraft in bombing targets in Iraq in retaliation for the Iraqi Islamic resistance’s attack on a US base in northern Jordan.
The survival and sustainability of the Zionist enterprise were dealt a knockout blow by the al-Aqsa Flood operation. It shattered Israel’s security and stability, cost it over $75 billion so far, and displaced over 500,000 of its settlers. Arab governments and leaders should wake up to this reality and bank on the resistance rather than an occupation state facing genocide charges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has condemned for genocide.
If only they could be as bold and courageous as UN Secretary-General António Guterres, leaders from Latin America, Africa, and Asia who have spoken out and severed relations or expelled ambassadors, and the hundreds of millions of people in the West, East, North, and South who have boycotted Israel and taken to the streets to demonstrate against its actions.
Or is that, also, too much to ask?
The 2020 Abraham Accords (AKA Trump Peace Plan):
Zhuangzi: “You can’t talk about the ocean to a frog living in a well, you can’t describe ice to a summer midge, and you can’t reason with an ignoramus.”
by Pepe Escobar at ZeroHedge
Selected players scattered around the Beltway silos of power, diligently working as messengers for the people who really run the show in the Hegemon, have concluded that a no holds barred confrontation with Russia would lead to the collapse of all of NATO; undo decades of US iron grip on Europe; and ultimately cause the Empire’s downfall.
Playing brinkmanship games sooner or later would meet the indestructible red lines inbuilt in the unmovable Russian object.
US elites are smarter than that. They may excel on calculated risk. But when the stakes are this high, they know when to hedge and when to fold.
The “loss” of Ukraine – now a graphic imperative – is not worth risking the loss of the whole Hegemonic ride. That would be too much for the Empire to lose.
So even as they get increasingly desperate with the accelerated imperial plunge into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss, they’re frantically changing the narrative – a domain in which they excel.
And that explains why discombobulated European vassals in NATO-controlled EU are now in total panic.
Davos this week offered bucketloads of Orwellian salad. The key, frantic messages: War is peace. Ukraine is not (italics mine) losing and Russia is not winning. Hence Ukraine needs way more weaponizing.
Yet even Norwegian Wood Stoltenberg was told to toe the new line that matters: “NATO is not moving into Asia. It’s China that is coming close to us.” That certainly adds a new wacky meaning to the notion of moving tectonic plates.
Keep the Forever Wars engine running
There is a total void of “leadership” in Washington. There is no “Biden”. Just Team Biden: a corporate combo featuring low-rent messengers such as de facto neocon Little Blinkie. They do what they’re told by wealthy “donors” and the financial-military interests that really run the show, reciting the same old cliché-saturated lines day after day, bit players in a Theatre of the Absurd.
Only one exhibit suffices.
Reporter: “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”
The President of the United States: “Well, when you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
The same in what passes for “strategic thinking” applies to Ukraine.
The Hegemon is not being lured into fighting in West Asia – as much as the genocidal arrangement in Tel Aviv, in tandem with US Zio-cons, wants to drag it into a war on Iran.
Still, the imperial machine is being steered to keep the Forever Wars engine running, non-stop, at varying speeds.
The elites in charge are way more clinical than the whole Team Biden. They know they will not win in what will soon be country 404. But the tactical victory, so far, is massive: enormous profits out of the frantic weaponizing; totally gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing the EU to the sub-status of a lowly vassal; and from now on plenty of time to find new proxy warriors against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to the whole Takfiri-neo ISIS galaxy.
From Plato to NATO, it may be too early to state it’s all over for the West. What is nearly over is the current battle, centered on country 404. As Andrei Martyanov himself stresses, it was up to Russia, once again, “to start dismantling what today has become the house of demons and horror in the West and by the West, and she is doing it again in a Russian way – by defeating it on the battlefield.”
That complements the detailed analysis expressed on the new hand grenade of a book by French historian Emmanuel Todd.
Yet the war is far from over. As Davos once again made it quite clear, they will not give up.
Chinese wisdom rules that, “when you want to hit a man with an arrow, first hit his horse. When you want to capture all the bandits, first capture their chief.”
The “chief” – or chiefs – certainly are far from being captured. BRICS+ and de-dollarization may have a shot at it, starting this year.
The plutocratic endgame
Under this framework, even massive US-Ukraine corruption involving rings and rings of theft from lavish US “aid”, as recently revealed by former Ukrainian MP Andrey Derkach, is a mere detail.
Nothing has been done or will be done about it. After all, the Pentagon itself fails every audit. These audits, by the way, did not even include the income from the massive multi-billion dollar heroin operation in Afghanistan – with Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo set up as the distribution center for Europe. The profits were pocketed by US intel operatives off the books.
When fentanyl replaced heroin as a domestic US plague, it was pointless to continue occupying Afghanistan – subsequently abandoned after two decades in pure Helter Skelter mode, leaving behind over $7 billion in weapons.
It’s impossible to describe all these Empire-centric concentric rings of corruption and institutionalized organized crime to a brainwashed collective West. The Chinese, once again, to the rescue. Taoist Zhuangzi (369 – 286 B.C.): “You can’t talk about the ocean to a frog living in a well, you can’t describe ice to a summer midge, and you can’t reason with an ignoramus.”
NATO’s cosmic humiliation in Ukraine notwithstanding, this proxy war against Russia, against Europe and against China remains the fuse that could light up a WWIII before the end of this decade. Who will decide it is an extremely rarefied plutocracy. No, not Davos: these are only their clownish mouthpieces.
Russia has reactivated a military factory system at lightning speed – now standing at about 15 times the capacity of January 2022. Along the front line there are about 300,000 troops, plus in the back two pincer armies of hundreds of thousands of mobile troops in each pincer being prepared to create a double envelopment of the Ukrainian Army and annihilate it.
Even if country 404 is utterly defeated in 2024, once again it’s imperative to stress it: this is far from over. The leadership in Beijing fully understands that the Hegemon is such a disintegrating wreck, on the way to secession, that the only way to hold it together would be a world war. It’s time to re-read T.S. Eliot in more ways than one: “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / and approach to the meaning restores the experience.”
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