As we race to November’s political armageddon, neocons leading US and European foreign policy find themselves in a strange place. Everyone agrees, all the other teams in the tournament are incompetent, disorganized, even lumbering “animals,” as described by former US European Command bossman Benny Hodges.
Yet, worried glances at the clock, the neocon team is uneasy. They need a 3rd quarter pep talk, a wake-up call. Maybe like this one.
Here’s what the neocons are really saying. This is their big game – against the Russians, against the Palestinians, against the other 5 billion people and 150 countries that want the US to Just. Stop. Now. War-loving egotists, they design slaughters and economic routs, while eating our freedoms morning, noon and night. They deserve to rule, like the great and wise philosopher kings they imagine themselves to be.
Yet, for all this, they feel like a team near collapse, and Coach Herb Brook’s speech rings hollow.
A famous neocon actor recently addressed an audience at a Golden Plate Award ceremony in the role of inspirational coach. He said,
We don’t have much time. The next few months will be decisive. Ahead of us in this war – Russia’s war against Ukraine and all of you, because this is Russia’s war against freedom itself – we are short of time to define what the outcome will be. And we must define it. Not Russia, not their bloody allies. We need to be faster. We need not to lose the next few months in war, so that we don’t lose the next decades.
Too few of our national decision-makers, schemers and war profiteers truly understand the hell of war, its unforgivable desecration of land, liberty and souls, its nurture of generational hatred. Would that we could emulate the animals. A wolf pack rejects sociopathic and selfish, horses kick away those who will not contribute to the peace, honeybee drones are unceremoniously dumped just outside the hive, once they finish their one annual task, and become hive parasites. Humans, in our visionary desire for dominance over everything and everyone, will reject no foul theology, no racism, no vague or specific hatred, in service of power. We embrace genocide and murder, unending and at scale, because as Beilby Porteus wrote in 1759:
One Murder made a Villain,
Millions a Hero. — Princes were privileg’d
To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime.
For Washington, Kiev and Tel Aviv, the numbers sanctify the crimes. Trump was ridiculed when he said peace is possible in 24 hours. But no doubt a peace that can outlast all of us is possible, and necessary. Rubble-buried Gazan communities and the Ukrainian breadbasket’s minefields deserve restoration and replanting. The theological arguments for war, destruction and murder, made by proudly ignorant and racist religious/political evangelicals, fail in every aspect. These arguments are built on sand, they rest on a false history, a false present, and a false future – despite their most aggressive and disciplined narratives.
There are no two-state solutions for them. There will be one state, for the “we” and only “we” will decide. Whether Zionists who condemn all non-Zionists, or Ukro-nationalists who raze Russian Orthodox churches and punish Ukrainians for reading books by 20th Century Russian novelists, the intolerance and arrogance is the same. Both governments imagine they are the put-upon, they are the noble ones. Both fight for racist and atheistic oligarchies, and both rely on the US taxpayer for their every action.
Israeli leaders have floated a Puerto Rico solution for “their” Palestinians, just as neocons in Europe and the US keep floating enclave and sub-citizen status for Russians in the former Ukraine. Native American history, and the US assumption of the Spanish empire from over 120 years ago holds sway among our geriatric visionaries. Rape and ravage the people based on culture, religion, and language. Steal the land and water, destroy familial roots, debase, democratize, and diffuse their political power. Legally limit their voting power while illegally ensuring their dependency upon and economic service to the central state. What’s not to like?
There is a way to peace. Political power always dissipates, sometimes very rapidly. Signs of that dissipation are evident in the US, strained from backing both sets of the ethnic nationalists. The pathetic banning of Russian media from US viewers, and the odd raids on American journalists echo the more direct policy in Israel of simply murdering and assassinating reporters on the ground and their families, or militarily seizing broadcasting facilities. In Ukraine, this takes the form of the CIA and State Department -backed and -facilitated “enemy lists” that feature prominent American politicians, journalists, scholars and former military servicemen, as well as targeted assassinations, arrests and murders reporters in and out of Ukraine, and party, church, and media bans throughout the country.
As political credibility collapses, US, Ukraine and Israeli economic and military weakness is also evident. Congress has moved to expand punishment for and definitions of anti-semitism, and to make permanent a Pompeo-era practice of labeling goods produced in the occupied territories as Israeli-made. Why? Because Israel’s behavior has increased global contempt for Israel, and boosted the global BDS movement, while war has caused many Israelis to leave the country, and close up their businesses. We see similar population and economic devastation in Ukraine as well. Instead of leading the way to peace and prosperity, the US seeks to create even more enemies, and mislead even more people as to the unsustainable cost and political disaster of US government -supported and -provoked wars. Creating enemies, misleading people, and going bankrupt further drives global abandonment of the US dollar.
The latest US National Defense Strategy Commission warned last week that: 1) the US should be able to, but cannot, fight three simultaneous wars; 2) the Pentagon is deficient, disorganized, demoralized and poorly led; 3) the “defense” sector needs vastly more cash and autonomy; and 4) other federal departments demanding a share of future budgets need to either align themselves with the DoD and CIA, or shut up. The commission, not surprisingly, was made up of the same idiots who have been placed on every DC commission in the last 40 years, all briskly marching to Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.
Peace may not be on the menu in DC, Tel Aviv or Kiev, yet it is achievable. Truth is bursting at the seams. Truth, even the ugly kind, is a messenger for peace. Truth needs no narrative control, it accepts no government channeling. Unlike men on the battlefields, and communities under mountains of rubble, it cannot be buried. The vast majority of Ukrainians oppose the war; it’s something they don’t want, conducted by people they don’t like. The Israeli state has relied too much and for too long on US economic and diplomatic little blue pills for their staying power. They have lost global support, watched their smartest and most productive citizens pack up and move, destroyed the souls of their younger generations, and slashed export and tech trust globally with their PETN-laced batteries and their arrogance.
We talk about softening the battlefield, and strategic demoralization of the enemy. Without a single physical weapon, or act of violence, truth does both to the dogs of war and princes of pillage. Unstoppable and invincible, truth is changing the world. Let’s take Coach Brooks’ 1980 hockey pep talk to heart. Truth tellers and peacemakers everywhere – you are meant to be here, this is your time!
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