https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/11/chris-hedges-the-horror-the-horror/
The Horror, The Horror
Israel's genocidal attacks, which are killing hundreds of Palestinians a day, including some 160 children, have expanded to shelling the remaining hospitals in Gaza.
DOHA, Qatar: I am in the studio of Al Jazeera’s Arabic service watching a live feed from Gaza City. The Al Jazeera reporter in northern Gaza, because of the intense Israeli shelling, was forced to evacuate to southern Gaza. He left his camera behind. He trained it on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It is night. Israeli tanks fire directly towards the hospital compound. Long horizontal red flashes. A deliberate attack on a hospital. A deliberate war crime. A deliberate massacre of the most helpless civilians, including the very sick and infants. Then the feed goes dead.
We sit in front of the monitors. We are silent. We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die. Everyone who needs oxygen will die. Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die. And what will happen to the 50,000 people who, driven from their homes by the relentless bombing, have taken refuge on the hospital grounds? We know the answer to that as well. Many of them, too, will die.
There are no words to express what we are witnessing. In the five weeks of horror this is one of the pinnacles of horror. The indifference of Europe is bad enough. The active complicity by the United States is unfathomable. Nothing justifies this. Nothing. And Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life.
Israel and the United States are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world. International and humanitarian law, including the Geneva Convention, are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq. They do not apply in Gaza. We will pulverize your neighborhoods and cities with bombs and missiles. We will wantonly murder your women, children, elderly and sick. We will set up blockades to engineer starvation and the spread of infectious diseases. You, the “lesser breeds” of the earth, do not matter. To us you are vermin to be extinguished. We have everything. If you try and take any of it away from us, we will kill you. And we will never be held accountable.
We are not hated for our values. We are hated because we have no values. We are hated because rules only apply to others. Not to us. We are hated because we have arrogated to ourselves the right to carry out indiscriminate slaughter. We are hated because we are heartless and cruel. We are hated because we are hypocrites, talking about protecting civilians, the rule of law and humanitarianism while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza a day, including 160 children.
Israel reacted with indignation and moral outrage when it was accused of bombing the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza, which left hundreds of dead. The bombing, Israel claimed, came from an errant rocket fired by Palestine Islamic Jihad. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that struck the hospital. Those of us who have covered Gaza have heard this Israel trope so many times it is risible. They always blame Hamas and the Palestinians for their war crimes, now attempting to argue that hospitals are Hamas command centers and therefore legitimate targets. They never provide evidence. The Israeli military and government lie like they breathe.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which has staff working in Al-Shifa, issued a statement saying patients, doctors and nurses are “trapped in hospitals under fire.” It called on the “Israeli government to cease this unrelenting assault on Gaza’s health system.”
“Over the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment. Al-Shifa hospital complex, the biggest health facility where MSF staff are still working, has been hit several times, including the maternity and outpatient departments, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries,” the statement read. “The hostilities around the hospital have not stopped. MSF teams and hundreds of patients are still inside Al-Shifa hospital. MSF urgently reiterates its calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients.”
Three other hospitals in northern Gaza and Gaza City are encircled by Israeli forces and tanks, in what a doctor told Al Jazeera was a “day of war against hospitals.” The Indonesian Hospital has reportedly also lost power. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that 20 of 36 hospitals in Gaza no longer function.
Israel and Washington’s cynicism is breathtaking. There are no differences in intent. Washington only wants it done quickly. Humanitarian corridors? Pauses in the shelling? These are vehicles to facilitate the total depopulation of northern Gaza. The handful of aid trucks allowed through the border at Rafah with Egypt? A public relations gimmick. There is only one goal – kill, kill, kill. The faster the better. All Biden officials talk about is what comes next once Israel has finished its decimation of Gaza. They know Israel’s slaughter will not end until Gazans are living in the open without shelter in the southern part of the strip and dying because of a lack of food, water and medical care.
Gaza before Israel’s ground incursion was one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. Imagine what will happen with 1.1 million Gazans from the north piled on top of over 1 million in the south. Imagine what will take place when infectious diseases such as cholera become an epidemic. Imagine the ravages of starvation. The pressure will build to do something. And that something, Israel hopes, will be to push the Palestinians over the border into the Sinai in Egypt. Once there, they will never return. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza will be complete. Its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank will begin.
That is Israel’s demented dream. To achieve it, they will make Gaza uninhabitable.
Ask yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors? If terror is the only language Israel uses to communicate, the only language it apparently understands, wouldn’t you speak back with terror?
Israel’s orgy of death will not crush Hamas. Hamas is an idea. This idea is fed on the blood of martyrs. Israel is giving Hamas an abundant supply.
....
https://brownstone.org/articles/bureaucracys-unstoppable-parasitic-growth/
Bureaucracy’s Unstoppable Parasitic Growth
My Dearest American Friends and Colleagues:
Just in case you didn’t notice, since the 1980s we have developed a very big problem which is growing exponentially. The US national debt has become unsustainable.
To a significant extent this debt is enabled by irresponsible printing and injection of fiat currency into the overall US economy by an unaccountable private “Federal Reserve” Bank. Today’s Federal Reserve routinely acts as a willing enabler rather than a check on administrative and deep state spending. The management of the Federal Reserve has become integrated into the interests and culture of the permanent bureaucracy. But that is merely one of many symptoms of a deeper problem.
Many factors drive this explosion of debt, but near the top of the causation list is that the executive branch and its permanent bureaucracy (administrative state + deep state) just does not care. They have no pressing reasons to care. They have developed a whole special economic logic to justify and rationalize not caring, called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
Functionally, unlike either industry (market forces) or the military (failed wars), there are no external forces currently limiting the expansion of the dysfunctional, counterproductive, and (frankly) parasitic behavior of today’s Executive branch.
Legislative branch oversight has been emasculated by consent with lobbyists collectively clamping down the Burdizzo, and in 1984 the Judicial branch conceded its authority to serve as a functional check on Executive/administrative branch arrogance via the Supreme Court Chevron Deference decision. And like the Federal Reserve, the informal “fourth estate” (corporate media), which historically provided a separate and semi-autonomous oversight function, has also been captured by this permanent bureaucracy.
The CIA, FBI, CISA and intelligence community have become enablers of administrative and deep state excesses and overreach. With this corrupted information ecosystem, there cannot be any accountability of the administrative and deep state. In cooperation with a variety of corporate and NGO partners via “public-private partnerships”, the executive branch has completely captured and co-opted all oversight mechanisms which could enable or enforce checks and balances. The “ballot box” is well on its way to being a mere inconvenience, because for the majority of voters the synthetic false reality projected by captured media is the only political “reality” they encounter.
This is how modern nation-states abruptly collapse. As one recent example, recall the history of the USSR and most of the former communist Eastern European states. Modern nation-states fail by suffocating under the weight of bloated unaccountable bureaucracies whose primary objectives are to serve and sustain themselves rather than to promote and defend the general welfare and security of the citizenry. The social contract is stomped into dust by the boot of an uncontrollably arrogant, authoritarian, self-serving bureaucracy.
To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?
-John Marshall, Chief justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835
To illustrate my point with one example of the current situation, please consider the following from “Heard Around the Hill”. This is a publication of the Council on National Policy, which has provided a snapshot of the current state of the Federal Budget stalemate between the Legislative branch – constitutionally tasked with managing the federal budget and funding the government, and the Executive branch (and it’s permanent administrative bureaucracy) – tasked with administering that budget.
House Republicans passed a plan to address the nation’s debt ceiling Wednesday, tying the increase to desperately-needed spending limits and reforms.
The package includes:
- Limiting future spending to FY22 levels
- Reclaiming unspent Covid money
- Defunding 87,000 new IRS agents
- Implementing work requirements for government assistance programs
The White House refused to negotiate, insisting Congress give them a blank check for future spending and betting that proposed reforms could not garner enough votes in the House.
Even Democrats have been critical of Biden’s refusal to negotiate. Senator Manchin described the approach as a “deficiency of leadership.” House Members have also disapproved of the tactic.
“A Down Payment On Fiscal Sanity” is how economist and former Assistant Treasury Secretary Mike Faulkender detailed the Republican plan.
In discussing the current state of US Federal government, these terms “Administrative State” and “Deep State” are often tossed about as if they are one and the same, but that is most definitely not the case. As described by Kash Patel, the Deep State is a type of shadow governance made up of informal, extra-constitutional, secret and unauthorized networks of power operating independently of a nation state’s duly elected political leadership, acting in pursuit of agendas and goals which are separate from the interests of the citizenry.
Administrative State is a term used to describe the phenomenon of executive branch administrative agencies which exercise bureaucratic power to create, adjudicate, and enforce their own rules. The administrative state abuses congressional non-delegation, judicial deference, executive control of agencies, procedural rights, and agency dynamics to assert control over and above both republic and constitutional principles.
Another related term often used to describe the modern American bureaucratic state is “Leviathan”, a word with biblical origins repurposed as the title of Thomas Hobbes’ monarchist 1651 book which advocates a strong centralized government. Hobbes argues that civil peace and social unity can be best achieved through the establishment of a commonwealth via a social contract. Hobbes’ ideal commonwealth is ruled by a singular sovereign power responsible for protecting the security of the commonwealth, while being granted absolute authority to ensure the common defense.
Within the growing hereditary ruling American oligarchy there is some degree of turnover and palace intrigue, as the fortunes of some wane while others rise. As with the rise of the British bourgeoisie and mixing of gentry with financially successful upper middle castes, this often reflects broader financial and technological trends within the overall geo-political and geo-economic context in which a globalized oligarchy competes.
The obvious irony being that this type of system was precisely what the American Revolution was intended to overturn, and precisely what the US Constitution was written to prevent.
And above all of this, we have now added a transcendently powerful new capability to the Leviathan of old. The rise of the CIA and its “Mockingbird/Mighty Wurlitzer” infiltration of both media and academia, the FBI and its politically weaponized COINTELPRO-type surveillance, infiltration and disruption capabilities, the DoD and its PsyOps/PsyWar capabilities designed for offshore conflicts but turned against domestic citizenry to support executive branch-defined “crisis” management, and the explosive growth of a new censorship-industrial complex has yielded a “Leviathan” with reality-bending information control capabilities the likes of which the historic British monarchy could only dream of. Propaganda has come a long way from the days of Edward Bernays’ seminal 1928 book by the same name.
The Washington DC-based Administrative/Deep State has emerged as a separate entity unto itself, with its own culture, purpose, privileges and prerogatives. A key characteristic of this separate cultural phenomenon and mindset- often geographically referred to as the “inside the beltway” set (referring to the I 495 freeway loop encircling DC and environs)- is a focus on self-preservation and personal advancement, rather than on achieving a mission, producing a deliverable, or serving the needs of outside-the-beltway flyover state serfdom.
Imperial DC beltway denizens form an incestuous culture, much like any historic imperial court. Passive-aggressive “slow walking” of initiatives has been refined to a fine art. Sexual favors are routinely exchanged to seal short-term alliances, both within agencies and between contractors and “Govies”. Nuances of administrative regulations are weaponized to enable petty counterproductive one-upmanship.
“Beltway Bandit” corporations, lobbyists (registered and unregistered) and “think tanks” cultivate, collect and support Deep State “swamp monsters” when the political wing they are allied with is out of power for a period, anticipating that these courtiers will be rotated back in with the next political shift or Executive branch “change” in leadership. And all are tied together in a revolving maypole dance.
Together, they collectively weave a Uniparty in which the commonalities of shared commitment to advancing the interests of the Administrative/Deep State court are far more important and lasting than any inconvenient superficial narrative about serving the interests of the general electorate and citizenry. In this beltway culture, actually solving national problems takes a back bench to the pageantry and Machiavellian machinations of the elite courtiers and their allies.
But with the advance of PsyWar capabilities, bolstered by advances in modern psychology, and combined with algorithmic control, censorship, and manipulation of all information, Deep State beltway denizens have been able to achieve a propaganda capability which rivals the Atomic Bomb in its political implications.
These actors are now able to decouple their activities from objective truth. There can never be any accountability or consequences for mismanagement or misdeeds when they are able to effectively control all information and communication.
Objective reality has become a theoretical post-modernist, surrealist construct, able to be contorted, moulded and enforced to comport with any synthetic version of reality which best supports Administrative State, SES and Deep State objectives. Corporate and social media lapdogs (rapidly becoming dominant via alliances with globalized investment funds), are bolstered and legitimized by coopted academia. Together they often act under the strong influence of Administrative State “intelligence” agencies and Deep State actors, and stand ever ready to create, control, propagate, and reinforce whatever narrative is needed.
Desire to achieve this sort of reality-bending groupthink or mass psychosis has been a common feature of bureaucracies, aristocracies, monarchies and oligarchies for as long as historical records have been kept. But what is different now is the power and penetration of modern digital algorithmic control mechanisms. We now witness creation of a lobotomized servant caste which enables an administrative bureaucracy nirvana of complete lack of accountability is now within reach. What could possibly go wrong?
I believe that a short answer is “paradigm shift”. This type of cognitive landscape, in which a synthetic reality is preserved and maintained despite increasing divergence from objective reality, is a setup for abrupt introduction of more adaptive alternatives. Examples of synthesized false realities include an unsustainable federal debt, a collapsing “safe and effective” Covid vaccine narrative, and the intrinsic contradictions of human activity-driven carbon dioxide levels representing a global existential crisis. Actively fabricated false realities create a situation where current governmental solutions drift further and further from optimal.
At some point, an abrupt disruption in perception, power, global finance or available technology will occur – a paradigm shift. And when a system, technical or political, has been prevented by externals from adapting to changing conditions (such as happens with propaganda), then a crisis can trigger catastrophic realignment of divergent synthetic and objective reality. In politics, these “earthquake” moments reflect abrupt resolution of shifting internal forces which have built up tension along a fault line, and often result in either revolutions or catastrophic failures of economies and civilizations.
Functionally, the US Government is now managed by disconnected Senior Executive Service (SES) “leadership”, acting in harmony with Administrative and Deep State castes, massive transnational financial institutions, public-private partnerships, corporate lobbyists and globalist non-governmental organizations such as the UN, WHO, WEF and Gates foundation.
This supra-constitutional alignment has enabled permanent Administrative and Deep State “management” of an out-of-control federal budget which supports a grotesque obsession with their maypole dance, court drama, one-upmanship, and Machiavellian machinations. And all who object are censored, subjected to character assassination and labeled fringe outliers by captured media.
Rather than solving the missions and problems which plague the electorate that they currently parasitize, these erstwhile public servants have removed any ability of citizenry and electorate to provide the oversight, control and correction function originally designed into the US Constitution by those with lifelong experience in dealing with an earlier Leviathan. One that was also characterized by arbitrary and capricious administrative authoritarianism. And in the current embodiment we now have amazingly powerful psychological tools placed in the hands of venal, self-serving, immature and all too often sociopathic individuals seeking self-gratification.
Indeed, what can possibly go wrong?
Abrupt, catastrophic economic and/or military collapse, that’s what.
How many wars has the USA lost since WW II? And now this amazingly expensive and corrupt Ukrainian foreign adventure is deconstructing itself. Which (mis) adventure seems to have mostly worked to strengthen and hone Russian military might while depleting and fracturing NATO unity and capabilities. Biden sought to drain and exhaust Putin, thereby yielding Russian regime change. In an amazing feat of geopolitical jiu-jitsu, the precise opposite may well come to pass.
And then we have the obscenely bungled public health and financial responses to the Covid crisis. And growing awareness that the “climate crisis” has been synthesized and weaponized to advance a variety of geopolitical power, control and financial objectives.
This level of massive Administrative and Deep State mismanagement is not sustainable, even with US economic and natural resource muscle.
History and archaeology is littered with the bones of civilizations and bureaucracies which became inwardly focused and lost track of their function and purpose. I would love to believe in a fairy tale world in which modest modifications in administrative agency guidelines and practices could result in a more functional ruling bureaucracy. But I am too old for fairy tales, and have myself spent too many years in the bowels of the Federal administrative state.
I fear that the dysfunctional and fundamentally corrupt DC Beltway culture will not change until we have a massive paradigm shift of some sort or another. Resolving these structural problems will require a major correction. It could occur at the ballot box, but the power of the intelligence community/censorship-industrial complex to distort reality to protect itself may have already reached a stage where this cannot happen.
However, the debt, the massive unsustainable debt, combined with the insatiable hunger of the Administrative and Deep State working cooperatively with the industrial masters of forever war and “biodefense” may soon trigger a global paradigm shift in power and finance.
And if that happens, I can only hope that I have enough guns, ammo, farm infrastructure and a well developed network of like minded friends to ride out the following storm.
But in such a brave new world, getting diesel for trucks and tractors will definitely be a problem. Probably time to dust off my equine teamster skills and train some horses to pull.
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