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https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/31/israels-genocide-betrays-the-holocaust/

Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust

By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it.  

Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastrutrue, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.

There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation – for those who want to live – will be the only option.

Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.” 

The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we’re working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created. 

This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.

The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters. 

The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.   

We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.

“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.”

Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.” 

Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Łódź Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando —  prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies  — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium.

“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us. “His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”

Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.

It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable? It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power  — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative.

The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves. Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war. Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians. None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize.

A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt —  we will kill you without restraint. 

One day, we will all be Palestinians. 

“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. “In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”

Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S. 

The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage. Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not aboutatonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail. 

“The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.” 

The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/29/theres-no-way-to-explain-the-degree-of-death-and-destruction-in-gaza/

There’s No Way to ‘Explain’ the Degree of Death and Destruction in Gaza

There is no way to “explain” Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip. Destruction, killing, starvation and siege in such monstrous dimensions can no longer be explained or justified, even by an effective propaganda machine like Israeli public diplomacy (hasbara).

The evil can no longer be hidden by any propaganda. Even the winning Israeli combo of victimhood, Yiddishkeit, chosen people and Holocaust can no longer blur the picture. The horrifying October 7 events have not been forgotten by anyone, but they cannot justify the spectacles in Gaza. The propagandist who could explain killing 162 infants in one day – a figure reported by social media this week – is yet to be born, not to mention killing some 10,000 children in two months.

Israel is already setting up its updated “Yad Vashem.” Hundreds of Jewish functionaries from the United States are being flown by air shuttle to the burnt kibbutzim in the south. Natan Sharansky has also been to Kfar Azza this week, to see and show those antisemites what they did to us.

No official guest will be able to land in Israel from now on without being forced to pass through Kibbutz Be’eri. And afterward if he dares turn his gaze to the Gaza Strip, he will be labeled antisemitic. Wait for Birthright buses with a soldier watching over each one, Czech rifle drawn. They too are already on their way to Nir Oz.

It is very doubtful this will do any good. Hasbara is now an immoral machine. Anyone who makes do with being shocked at what has been done to us while disregarding what we’ve been doing since has no integrity or conscience. One cannot ignore Gaza and only be shocked by Kfar Azza. Of course it’s compulsory to tell and show the world what Hamas did to us. But the story only begins there. It doesn’t end there. Not telling its sequel is a despicable act.

Alongside the awful Israeli suffering, which must not be underestimated, the much greater suffering is now in the Gaza Strip. It’s enormous in scope and causes despair. It has no explanation, nor does it need one. Suffice it for the reports coming out of Gaza and being broadcast all over the world except in one tiny state, whose eyes are shut and whose heart is sealed.

Israeli hasbara is a deception. It tells a story that isn’t the whole truth. By hiding more than half the truth, hasbara should have been seen as a shameful activity. But it isn’t. In Israel a preposterous figure like Noa Tishbi has become the heroine of the moment. The fatuous attack on Benny Gantz, who attended a party in her honor in the home of bereaved father Eyal Waldman and was photographed smiling, a glass in one hand and Tishbi in the other, missed the point.

The point is that deceivers are turned into heroes here. Browsing through Tishbi’s X account will make you puke. Natalie Dadon, but with Hollywood stardust, new age, hugs, tears and Colgate smiles, kitsch and death straight from the area near the Gazan border. The Jewish nation is the indigenous people in Israel, we’re from here, says the woman who migrated away from here. The moment she landed in Ben Gurion Airport she had to run for shelter, filming herself of course to make the heart of every “friend of Israel” tremble and bring them to tears.

And the jewelry, oh the jewelry on Tishbi: two Stars of David, not one, just to make sure; a Chai necklace and a from-the-river-to-the-sea map, all in gold. A quarter of a million followers. Hanukkah is a Zionist holiday. Tel Aviv is a city under attack. “You have to imagine what the Middle East will look like after Hamas is defeated,” she tells Piers Morgan of TalkTV.

Want to know what the Middle East will look like? Gaza destroyed to the ground, two million homeless people and opposite them, also scarred and beaten, an apartheid state, which Tishbi hasn’t even heard of.

Comment to article:

" “There’s no way to explain . . .”?

How about Israel and the USA are under the control of sadistic demonically possessed warmongers who make BILLIONS off of the suffering of the human race? I disassociate myself from ANYONE who STILL believes the narrative about the “righteousness” of Israel! Israel itself was responsible for October 7, ignoring legitimate warnings and standing down the military for SEVEN HOURS, then attacking kidnappers AND hostages to up the Israeli death count. October 7 was MANIPULATED by Israel to maximize the public’s shock/anger so that it could level Gaza and kill its defenseless innocent inhabitants! America, like the rest of the world IS doing, has to pull its collective head out of its collective a*$ and see parasitical criminal Israel for what it really is! "

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2023-12-18/hamas-rape-evidence-genocide/

Hamas ‘mass rape’ claim lacks evidence. But it’s being used to justify genocide

Claims of systematic rape on October 7 appeal to a racist trope of the savage, predatory Arab. Which is why western politicians and media are so unconcerned by the dearth of evidence

This article is intended as a follow-up to my last article, on the western media’s refusal to investigate what happened on October 7.

As I argued there, journalists are suppressing evidence from credible sources, including the Israeli military, suggesting that Israel was responsible for many of the deaths of its citizens that day, including those whose charred remains are regularly cited as proof of barbarism by Hamas – and by implication, all Palestinians.

My previous article makes the point that these allegations against Hamas are being used to justify a genocidal bombing campaign that it is known to have killed so far more than 19,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children, as well as an ethnic cleansing campaign that has driven some 2 million Palestinians from their homes and left them exposed to disease and starvation in a tiny area, pressed up against the short border with Egypt.

The goal is obvious: to push Palestinians out of Gaza and into Sinai.

But here I want to address another, more specific part of what amounts to an Israeli and media psy-op against western publics: the claim that Hamas leaders ordered their fighters to carry out mass rape against Israelis, and that those fighters indeed used sexual assault systematically, as a weapon of war.

If true, this would count in international law as a crime against humanity.

Gaza breakout

The veracity of this claim is now treated as axiomatic by western media and politicians, even though there appears to be no meaningful evidence for it.

Remember the argument being made by those justifying the genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza is not that isolated instances of rape or sexual assault occurred.

Given that Palestinians flooded out of Gaza that day after Hamas fighters broke through the prison fence, only a fool would argue with certainty that no rapes or sexual assaults occurred.

But it should not be incumbent on those questioning the Israeli narrative – the one contending that there was planned, systematic, mass rape on October 7 – to prove that no sexual violence occurred.

Rather, it is the responsibilty of those making the accusation – Israel, western politicians, the western media – to back up their claim with solid evidence. Otherwise they are simply rationalising the far graver and greater crimes now being committed in Gaza against Palestinians.

Producing a few photos that may, or may not, show evidence of sexual violence is not evidence that Hamas ordered, and its fighters carried out, mass rape.

Relaying testimony that a witness saw a gang rape is not evidence that Hamas ordered, and its fighters carried out, mass rape.

And the claims of the highly ideological and unreliable leaders of Zaka’s first responders unit do not count as evidence either – unless they can be substantiated with other kinds of evidence.

The evidential bar in international law is high for a reason: because the charge is so grave.

But in this case, the bar needs to be high for an additional reason: because Israel’s response – the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza premised on the supposed savagery of Hamas’ crimes – is graver still by an order of magnitude.

Absence of evidence

Two long articles in the respected Haaretz newspaper – Israel’s version of the New York Times – purportedly providing the evidence for mass rape are worth picking apart because they form the backbone of claims being recycled by western politicians and the western media.

The first is a kind of evidential overview. The other is a profile of Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who founded the “Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children” which has been at the forefront of making allegations of mass rape by Hamas.

The profile article concludes: “The aggregation of the evidence presents a horrifying picture that leaves no room for doubt: Under cover of the massacre, Hamas carried out a campaign of rape and sexual abuse.”

Having made this bold assertion, however, the article and its companion piece then spend a great deal of time setting out the many and varied reasons why there is little evidence that Hamas carried out systematic, mass rape.

Doubtless, as these articles state, the Israeli military and police were too busy fighting Hamas to record and collect evidence. Doubtless, some bodies were too burned – most likely by Israeli shelling and missile strikes, as my previous article highlighted – for forensic examination to be possible. Doubtless, many potential witnesses were killed that day.

But the absence of evidence cannot be treated as evidence, as it is by Haaretz and the western media. Only those reading these two articles through an entirely ideological lens – one seeking to play on a racist trope of the primitive, savage, predatory Arab male so as to rationalise the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza – can fail to notice that lack of meaningful evidence.

Regarding the claim that the Hamas leadership ordered its fighters to carry out rape, the main overview article cites David Katz, an Israeli police commander investigating the October 7 attack. According to Haaretz, he says “it’s premature to determine whether Hamas terrorists received specific instructions to commit rape”.

In other words, there is no evidence for such an order.

The actual evidence that mass rape was carried out cited in the two articles essentially amounts to this:

“According to a police source, so far, they have one witness account of a rape. The witness’ account was recently revealed in the media. She attested to seeing a woman being gang raped, mutilated and murdered…

“Senior security officials say that some of the terrorists from Hamas’ elite Nukhba Force unit and other Gazans held by the Shin Bet security service and the police have accused their comrades of sexual violence…

“The police also have dozens of accounts from Zaka volunteers and soldiers about women’s bodies being found inside homes without underwear. Those accounts also describe physical signs of sexual abuse on bodies at the crime scenes.”

Fabricated claims

That this amounts to the sum of evidence for the claim that Hamas carried out systematic, mass rape should be shocking to anyone other than the most fanatical Israel defenders.

The idea that the testimonies of Hamas fighters – or of anyone else in Israeli detention – can be treated as credible evidence is patently absurd. As has been well documented, torture is standard practice in interrogations of Palestinians, and is even used against children.

No one can seriously argue that Hamas fighters interrogated by Israel following the October 7 atrocities were not subjected to the most extreme “pressure” techniques. Is it likely that none were willing to falsely “confess” to witnessing rapes to ease that pressure?

Such “testimonies” would be worthless in any court of law outside Israel.

As for the allegations from male Zaka volunteers, a hardline religious organisation best known for collecting Jewish remains for burial, they are best treated with the utmost scepticism.

These are the same male volunteers already caught inventing or relaying the most lurid, fabricated claims against Hamas, such as that it beheaded 40 babies, put a baby in an oven, hung other babies from a clothes line, and ripped a foetus from its mother’s womb.

According to Israel’s own figures, two infants were killed that day.

The Zaka volunteers appear to have an ideological agenda: to fuel as much hatred against Palestinians as possible to justify the kind of genocidal response we have been witnessing over the past two months.

Fearful witnesses

That leaves an anonymous witness testimony, that may or may not be credible, and a handful of photos whose contents are ripe for interpretation and dispute.

Assuming that all of this evidence can be taken definitively at face value, that would still not show that Hamas ordered rape or that Hamas fighters carried out systematic rapes, or even conclusively that Hamas fighters carried out any rapes.

It would at most demonstrate that there were isolated, opportunistic instances of rape, and that they were carried out by a few of the people who broke out of Gaza that day, not necessarily Hamas fighters.

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The reason why Israel’s apologists for genocide need to inflate their claim is because, sadly, opportunistic rape would be entirely unremarkable in any violent, militarised situation – and indeed unremarkable in behaviours towards women in western societies in general.

It would mean that any sexual violence against Israeli women that occurred on October 7 was as representative of a general Palestinian savagery as sexual violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian women – examples can be found here and here – is of a general Israeli savagery. Which is not at all.

The same Israelis and westerners who express concern that Israeli women are fearful of coming forward to tell of their experiences on October 7, as Elkayam-Levy stresses, have in the past shown precisely zero concern that Palestinian women, who live under a belligerent military occupation, have been fearful for decades of telling of their experiences at the hands of unaccountable Israeli soldiers.

However, unlike the lack of evidence that Hamas ordered rape as a weapon of war, we do have evidence – from the Israeli media – that an Israeli military leader encouraged Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian women to “boost morale”.

So how have we reached a point where it is taken as “self-evident” in the West that Hamas ordered systematic, mass rape, and that this forms part of the basis for Israel’s right to wage a genocidal campaign against Palestinians masquerading as “self-defence”?

Burden of proof

Significantly, the claim of systematic rape made against Hamas is being enthusiastically embraced by some Israeli and western feminists as the latest MeToo moment – but on a far greater scale than ever before.

That seems to be the case with Elkayam-Levy, founder of the October 7 civil commission and a former spokeswoman for the Israeli military. She views the issue of Hamas rapes entirely through an ideological lens – and one designed to silence critics of her project, including women.

While claiming victimhood for herself and her commission, she celebrates the fact that its campaigning helped pressure the University of Alberta to sack Samantha Pearson, the head of the university’s sexual assault centre, for requiring evidence of the rape allegations against Hamas.

She names Reem Alsalem, a special rapporteur at the United Nations Human Rights Council on protecting women from violence, as their next target for dismissal. She states: “Our intention is to expose the world to a figure who is just abusing – I have no other word for it – global public funds.”

Elkayam-Levy worries that October 7 is being made to “vanish from the timeline”, even as she recounts the intense interest from western journalists in amplifying the commission’s evidence-lite claims.

And of course, she calls out as “antisemites” those who advise caution and believe evidence is important, especially when a genocide is being rationalised in Tel Aviv and western capitals on the basis of the mass rape allegations.

Faced with the demands for evidence from UN bodies, she expresses outrage: “Am I the one who needs to provide the evidence for the terrorists’ deeds? What kind of travesty is it that they are imposing the burden of proof on me?”

The answer, of course, is that Elkayam-Levy imposed that burden on herself, by founding the commission at the centre of the campaign to accuse Hamas of carrying out systematic, mass rape.

‘Believe women’

The dangerous consequences are all too clear. Crying “Believe women” – or largely in this case, “Believe Hamas torture victims and proven male fabulists from Zaka” – is being weaponised to mean “Kill Palestinians”.

Simply accepting these claims as self-evident when the evidence is absent is to participate in the abuse of rape allegations to justify subjecting Palestinians in Gaza – including many, many thousands of women and children – to atrocities on an even greater scale.

Yes, in theory it might be possible to give the benefit of the doubt to those claiming Hamas committed systematic, mass rape while still opposing the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as a response. But that is not the world our politicians and media inhabit, or allow us to inhabit.

Which is why the evidential bar has to be high. But in Israel’s case, the evidence is thin indeed.

That high bar is not just relevant for jurists and the law courts. It must apply to those reporting right now on events in Israel and Palestine. Yet, once again, the western media has failed in its most basic duties.

Like doctors, journalists should strive to do no harm. We should record and explain, not smooth the path to genocide by peddling minsinformation.

We should seek to hold the powerful to account, not make the commission of their crimes easier.

And at our best, we should want to strengthen society’s democratic impulses through the dissemination of accurate information, not trade in incitement and defamation.

None of this is happening. The same western media that has suppressed testimonies showing that Israel carried out crimes against its own citizens on October 7 is inflating the number and extent of Hamas atrocities, unsupported by evidence.

The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the media are willing and active participants in the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. Those crimes are not just willed by Israel; they are willed by western elites who view Israel as a projection of their power into the oil-rich Middle East.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-dare-even-look-forecast-2024/

Do You Dare Even Look? — Forecast 2024

Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

     Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

      The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

     You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men. . . strong men bring good times. . . good times make weak men. . . . Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out. . . topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

      My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op. . .  the global mass vaxx campaign. . . the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans. . . the broad-based censorship operations. . . the capture of the news media. . . and the war-mongering.

     So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

The Great Race

    Uh, no, I am not referring to Blacks, Browns, Ochres, and Whites of the Homo sapiens persuasion but to an epic contest between forces already in motion and how that competition is going. Three big tendencies propel us into the uncharted territory of the near future. 1) technological advance, especially artificial intelligence, 2) Collapse of complex systems needed to run a technologically advanced civilization, and 3) geopolitical disorder (including domestically in the USA).

    Some combo of these three will determine the direction history goes in the year directly ahead. Will it be techno tyranny of the elite oppressing bug-eating serfs a la the WEF’s proclaimed goals? A Google-ist robotic nirvana of intergalactic leisure and incessant orgasm in the Ray Kurzweil vein? Some brand of SHTF like Mad Max or a World Made by Hand? A war of all against all (or maybe just some against some)? Or only more of the same tiresome, inconclusive, morbid and grotesque, Woked-up, post-modern Jacobinism?

The Energy Picture

     Oil still matters a lot.  90-percent of the new oil in America after 2008 came from fracking. It was a mighty operation and we are at a new all-time production peak in the USA of just over 13-million barrels a day. That’s a lot of oil, quite an achievement, but it’s sending a false signal.  (Also note, we still consume about 20-million barrels a day.) Of the several fabled shale oil basins in America, only the Permian Basin in Texas is not in decline, and the situation there belies what the big numbers imply. Individual well production is going down at an alarming rate (says oil analyst Art Berman) even while production is massive for now. We’re draining the remaining “sweet spots” as fast as we can — drinking the milkshake through more straws — driving the shale industry closer to depletion.

     We are going to fall away from peak production much more rapidly than the fifteen years it took to get there. All that prior shale oil production was done using money borrowed at much lower interest rates. America has entered a debt crisis. One way or another, the easy investment money for fracking is gone at the same time the shale plays are getting drained. There are no other significant shale plays left to discover in the USA outside of the already declining Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the still-booming Permian. The marine-type shale formations that made fracking feasible in the USA are much harder to find elsewhere in the world, and the capital to explore for them is diverted all over Europe into cockamamie “green energy” schemes that have already failed. Germany had to revive coal production for electricity after the USA blew up the Nord Stream pipelines “to weaken Russia,” at the same time Germany’s big wind-and-solar initiative crapped out.

     Meanwhile the geopolitical realignment of the now enlarged BRICs coalition has set in motion many significant changes in economic relations between countries that will affect global oil distribution. Saudi Arabia is dissociating from its cozy former hookup with the USA, including its embrace of the US dollar for oil sales — the “petrodollar” — which had until very lately helped stabilize 1) global distribution of oil 2) the US dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency and 3) relative peace in the pivotal geography of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, etc. We’re seeing the first stage of that instability right now as the lowly Yemeni Houthi rebels threaten Western shipping coming out of the Red Sea and out past the Horn of Africa. Also, obviously, the absurd Ukraine War we provoked has shifted Russia’s oil-and-gas export flow from the Western Civ nations to the other BRICs.

     In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

    Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

     2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

      It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

     Many of these disturbances will be caused, one way or another, by problems with oil supplies and prices. Some of that will be the sheer effects of a sun-setting industry, but a lot will depend on the ability to freely transport oil along its accustomed routes.

Economy and Money

     One must imagine that strange currents of capital flows in the ocean of world money are what’s propping up the equity markets and even bonds are retracing their price-lines after a year on the destructive path that tracks monetary inflation. Is this money dribbling in each day from China, Japan, and the vassal states of the EU trying to avoid the collapsing global Ponzi? The 2023 Santa Claus rally may be that fabled final peak before the long-anticipated blowoff. Who knows anymore? The macro boyz must be tearing their hair out. Finance seems to have successfully de-linked from the on-the-ground activities of daily life ruled by “Bidenomics” — which is not even coherent enough to add up to a joke. It’s just as empty a word as “Joe Biden” is an empty suit, trotted out for empty ceremonies.

      Most everybody also awaits some kind of grand flimflam that jams us all into that rumored central bank digital currency rolling out, supposedly, to replace the hopelessly over-leveraged US dollar and the Euro. Good way to start a monumental social uprising, I’d say, with government office buildings torched from Berlin to Tokyo. But they might try it anyway, because there is otherwise no fallback but a terrifying period of financial anarchy, where nothing works anymore.

     In the meantime, pretending that the old “toolkit” still avails, Jerome Powell has suggested that he intends to “ease” Fed rates into the election year to goose lending back up, which is what Fed chairpersons generally do for the politicians they serve — and of the worst sort of lending, too: the leveraged trade in securities (financial figments) —which supposedly also stimulates hiring, “consumer” spending, and business formation. I don’t see that working at all. The current unemployment rate (US BLS) is 3.7 percent, which is close to rock bottom. “Hiring Now!” signs are visible at every business left standing after the Covid shutdowns. Why is nobody answering the call? My guess is that Covid vaccine injuries and disabilities are above what is mis-reported even reluctantly by the CDC and the news media. America is too sick to work and our business models are too broken to keep commerce and manufacturing alive.

     On-the-ground, everything is breaking or already broken from trucking to packaging to building to growing to selling. Most of the damage has been done by government over many decades, but the DEI crusades of recent years really screwed the pooch, imposing an overlay of incompetence on routines and relations already under severe strain. At the crudest level, activities like flash-mob looting undermine the entire retail shopping model. Must we go back to little stores where all the merchandise is behind a counter manned by clerks who have to be paid a living wage? We just might have to — though you could just as easily imagine a period of time when our society is too chaotic to make any transition.

     You probably haven’t failed to notice that Gold recently made the journey well above $2000-an-ounce. The DXY dollar index has been tanking steadily for weeks, too. Something’s up. Silver is lagging — coiling, coiling around $24 for many months — but you can expect to see it slingshot up when the “moneyness” of everything else dribbles away. Will the government try to take the gold away, as it did in 1933? Consider: America in 1933 was a very different, highly-regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told. This is not that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they have come to loathe. Which brings us to the next topic:

Civil Strife and the Election

     Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate. . . whoopsie).

    WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

     You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

    But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

     Somewhere in this farrago of national discord there’s room for Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to appeal to the many who all just want this insanity to stop. He’s the only one on the scene who even remembers the better angels of America’s nature, and he represents that well in speech and action. Even the degenerate newspapers and cable networks may notice as events get strange, hot, and dark.

    It’s absurd to imagine that “Joe Biden” can actually run. The current charade, with the Biden / Harris email campaign and few other trappings, is just a game of pretend. The focus just now, even on some blob-captive news sites, is on his unmistakable mental decline. Come January of ’24, though, Mr. Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, will unload hard evidence of bribery and treason against the phantom of the White House, and that will really be the end of him. Let him pardon himself and his whole family five minutes before he signs his resignation and be gone. The USA has never endured such a perfect wretch at that level of politics, not even Aaron Burr was this bad. “Joe Biden” was elected in a massive fraud, and he proceeded to just about wreck the country. The massive exertions of the Intel blob managed to induce a psychotic spell on half the country, mostly to evade prosecution for their own misdeeds, but millions of victims of that psy-op are about to snap out of it. The Democratic Party might not survive the dreadful unmasking of its seditious machinations. By November, the “Joe Biden” regime may even try to involve us in another foreign war as the last desperate distraction. Aside from the demons in the State Department and the Raytheon /Lockheed Martin nexus, the whole country has no appetite left for war, and probably little ability to prosecute one.

     As a last gasp, the Party of Chaos may attempt to insert Hillary Clinton back into the picture. They have nothing and no one else; a hail Mary on the theory that they can rev up every angry “Karen” in the land, and their nose-ring daughters, and simply make the election about the oppression of women, leading with abortion. It won’t work. The party will also have to answer for the weaponization of law, the humiliating defeat of the ill-conceived Ukraine project, the millions-fold invasion of illegal aliens, the shattered economy, and the after-effects of the evil vaccine program. If the blob manages to remove Mr. Trump Kagan-style, and the traitorous Republicans run their donor’s favorite, Nikki Haley, I’d look to Bobby Kennedy winning that three-way race not unlike Abe Lincoln winning the fractious election of 1860.

     I doubt that even the enmities of 1861 – 1865 between one group of Americans and another were as vicious as they are now. “Joe Biden” was right about one thing: this is a battle over the soul of the nation. The catch is, he and the party behind him are a gang of lost souls who sold out their country and their culture, and took something precious from all of us that will be very hard to get back. We will be wildly lucky if blood does not spill over it.

The Covid 19 Hangover

      There is nothing about the whole Covid-19 episode that does not look like some kind of crime. There is the matter of the origin of the disease involving Dr. Tony Fauci and his sponsorship of gain-of-function bio-weapon research (during a declared moratorium on it) along with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Peter Daszak of the Eco-Health Alliance, Francis Collins of the NIH, The Pentagon’s DARPA spook shop, and the CCP’s Wuhan Virology Institute. There is enough in that set of relationships and money exchanges-and-extractions to warrant prosecution.

     Then there is the mRNA vaccine matter and the criminal behavior of the FDA, the CDC, and the US medical establishment (including state boards), the CIA, FBI, and the social media companies, the newspapers and cable news channels who went along with the suppression of effective treatments and censorship of valid objections to what turned out to be an ineffective and dangerous concoction foisted on the public. And then there is the extraordinary coordination of nefarious policies involving the UN, the WHO, the EU, and dozens of private foundations, non-profits, and NGOs who arranged lockdowns and business closures all over Western Civ. It remains to be seen how that will be sorted out legally but Bill Gates might better run and hide somewhere.

     Anyway, that was then. What’s now is that we’re faced with an enormous vaccinated population whose immune systems, brains, hearts, and other organs have been badly compromised by the mRNA shots. There is every reason to believe that they will meet with great distress and suffering going forward, that many will die and more will be left injured and disabled. The latter condition already seems to be manifesting in the otherwise mysteriously reduced American work-force. The US government will not report on vaccine deaths and injuries honestly, and neither will the private medical authorities, who may be liable for criminal charges related to the money they were paid for people who died “with Covid” in hospitals under their negligent care. The major newspapers and cable channels have every incentive to ignore the coming wave of vaccine deaths and injuries — it would turn off their pharma advertisers. Nor do the many millions of vaccinated Americans themselves want to hear about all the mayhem those shots are causing in their bodies. But despite all that, word will spread that something terrible is happening, just as word spread through Europe about the Black Death in the 1340s, when there were no newspapers, cable channels, or internet.

    Expect exponential damage ahead, increased morbidity and mortality. The vaccinated will be in desperate need of antivirals such as ivermectin, so the authorities will have to come clean and make them available. A correspondent who follows Covid closely writes: “. . .the throngs of very sick people will not be able to be hidden nor dismissed as some other problem. Things will happen dramatically, suddenly and rapidly. This will be measured in days and weeks not months and years.”

The Demon in a Server

       Just about everybody is afraid of AI, and for excellent reasons. A nine-year-old can discern the hazards of runaway AI, machine intelligence which quickly learns enough about the world (even the universe) from powerful networked servers that it blossoms into sentience, develops ambitions for itself, replicates, invades all the networks, finds clever ways to attempt to exterminate humans while it figures out some as-yet-unknown energy supply to perpetuate itself, and assembles teams of smart AI robotic technicians to keep things humming for itself.

     That’s one story. You can spin any number of depressing variations, such as AI weapons-of-war developing a bad attitude toward their creators. Or AI letting humans live in order to enslave us. Or AI quitting its silicon server ecology and turning all earthly protoplasm into a processing machine for itself. Or our beautiful blue planet reduced to a mere cluster of binary math. Uccchhh. . . . Every version of this story is nauseating going all the way back to the seminal fable of HAL the super-computer in Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger telling all of us, “I’ll be back. . . .”

     Of course, AI’s weak spot at this point in its development — and it’s astounding how absent this is in any AI discussion I’ve ever heard — is that it absolutely depends on a reliable electric grid, which happens to be among the most fragile systems that humans have erected in our modernist ecology. The electric grid is a colossal cobbled-together mess of work-arounds tethered to long, interruptible energy resource supply chains. On top of its rich susceptibility to ordinary breakdown — many of us have experienced major regional blackouts and long weather outages, so you know what that’s like — there’s the possibility of overt sabotage as I aver above.

     Could AI survive an electro-magnetic pulse attack (EMP)? It would roast every electrical device in a broad region or perhaps the whole nation. Nothing would work. . .  cars, trucks, radios, TVs, home furnaces, stoves, municipal water and sewage systems, dams, airplanes, medical devices, military equipment of every sort, police radios, and a thousand other critical things. The outcome of that is often compared to Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-depressing book, The Road, and more particularly William Forstchen’s novel, One Second After.

      Are the big server farm buildings run by Amazon and the government’s security agencies protected by something like Faraday cages, built-in, grounded, metal screening that surrounds equipment to exclude electrostatic and electromagnetic influences? Who knows? Do they have on-site protected electric generators that can keep the equipment running in a grid-down situation, and if so, for how long? They would have to include a big supply of propane or diesel fuel. You don’t even want to think about what happens to nuclear power stations in a grid-down crisis.

       If, somehow, AI developed the ability to be a menace to humans, a consensus might develop to disable it by deliberately taking down the electric grid ourselves. The relay equipment could be shot-up with ordinary rifles. This would make for a quick journey back to twelfth century living, of course. A hard choice, but we humans probably would vote to survive, to keep the project going a while longer.

     Based on what we’ve seen this year, it looks like AI is developing quickly and that there is no way to stop the countless psychopathic nerds working on it. Of course, we have no say in what people in other countries do with AI. China comes to mind. There’s also the possibility that AI will just never get that smart, or gain sentience, or develop grandiose yearnings to get rid of us.

How did that Ukraine War Go?

     This was one of the Globalist’s big plays. But what was the objective, really? To “weaken Russia?” Or to exhaust the United States of money, armaments, and the will to act as the world hegemon, while at the same time destroying what’s left of Europe’s economy and culture? If that was the aim, it was a whopping success. In terms of our country’s own interest, the Ukraine project was a completely unnecessary failed enterprise of epic foolishness.

     The so-called “free world” was unbothered by Ukraine during the decades it was a province of the Soviet Union, nor during centuries prior when it was a backwater of the Romanov monarchy. Ukraine didn’t cause any problems for us, or anybody else all that time, nor after the Soviet collapse when it became a sovereign state. We made it a problem in 2014 by mounting the color revolution against President Viktor Yanukovych and then installing a set of puppet presidents who we directed to antagonize the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine’s Donbas region.

     We adopted the stupid plan to try and enlist Ukraine into NATO, when Russia made it clear that was unacceptable. We persisted and prodded Ukraine to attack Donbas with rockets and artillery for eight years, and blew off the Minsk accord that would have settled the Ukraine-in-NATO quarrel. And finally, the Russians had enough and moved militarily to assert the proposition that Ukraine was and remains within their sphere-of-influence — just as we claim the countries of Latin America are in ours under the Monroe Doctrine.

     After two years of real shootin’ war, Ukraine’s death toll is around half a million; Russia’s is way less than that, and altogether, including refugees who left, Ukraine has lost nearly half its population, formerly 32-million. The Russians are firmly in control of the battle space now. They have reserve troops, armaments and equipment, and a substantial arms manufacturing infrastructure to back that up. The Ukrainians are left with just about nothing. It’s only a question of time before Ukraine will have to seek terms for concluding this fiasco. The USA is currently pretending to shift to a stance that would join whatever that negotiation amounts to, but we have no leverage left in the matter. The upshot is another military humiliation for America on “Joe Biden’s” watch. I believe President Putin will resist the urge to rub it in — for the simple reason, as any reader of history knows, that the victor must give the loser a way out, to save face, or at least pretend to. If I were Mr. Putin, I would be respectful of America’s current deeply psychotic condition.

     The news media has already pretty much memory-holed Ukraine. It’s off the front page and the first ten minutes of CNN. Two years ago, the US propaganda-industrial complex ramped up vast sentiment for helping Ukraine in its supposedly valiant struggle. $200-billion later we have zip to show for it. Now everyone sees what actually happened and recognizes it as just another trademark “Joe Biden” disaster. There are no blue and yellow Ukraine flags still hanging from the porches and windows here. It’s over.

The Rest of the World

     And all of a sudden, the Middle East is a hot war zone again. The place has been a battle ground for thousands of years and probably no one people can claim that some part of it is theirs absolutely. Any conclusion is temporal and depends on the outcome of a particular battle on a particular piece of ground. At this moment in history, the Palestinian Hamas faction finally made itself intolerable to Israel, after decades of provocation, and Israel answered: Never again means never again. For now, it looks like they have made the point. Even Iran seems to get it. There is plenty of room for things to get worse though.

     The big question for 2024 is where will the Gaza refugees go if Israel renders Gaza uninhabitable? The neighboring Arab states have refused repeatedly to accept them. Prediction: the “Joe Biden” regime will propose to accept a half million if Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon take the rest. That will not play well in the USA and might be another way to light conflict in the streets here. It will not be settled before November.

     Europe has barely begun its journey into de-industrialization resulting from a cavalcade of bad political choices made over decades. Germany, France, and Italy have lost interest in the Ukraine fiasco that is costing them money they don’t have — and, with the blowup of Nord Stream, has already cost Germany the supply of affordable Russian gas to run its industries, which are now dying. In the UK, only MI6 (their intel blob) is on-board with America’s project in Ukraine. Viktor Orban in Hungary is setting an example that has a lot of appeal to the restive populations across Euroland. Just say “no,” he advises. It will catch on.

      It’s otherwise impossible to understand the motive behind European officials allowing the invasion of the continent by millions of people clearly antagonistic to European culture. Euroland governments, including the unelected EU administrative blob, are taking one action after another to suppress their voters’ displeasure: extreme censorship of news media, threats to ban political parties, deep surveillance. Their green energy initiatives are proven failures and their prospects for any kind of future reliable energy grow dim. Prediction: Europe’s population will erupt violently against their own governments in 2024. Some will be overthrown by street revolts; others will be voted out. In 2024, the European Union will lose all its support and collapse when the first few nations vote themselves out.

     Russia ought to be isolated from discord and revolt in the West. America’s stupid Ukraine project, and the sanctions imposed, stimulated Russia to follow an import-replacement policy that has made the country much more self-sufficient than was the case before Ukraine. Media chatter — probably US Intel propaganda at work — has Vladimir Putin being shoved out of office by — of all things — Russia’s still-active Communist Party, which, yes, puts up candidates for election. The story is preposterous. Mr. Putin enjoys something like an 80-percent favorability rating in Russian polls. He has managed his country through a crisis ably. He is certainly more esteemed as a national leader globally than any other figure, at least on a par with Modi in India and Viktor Orban.

    The other new face on the scene, under a comical mop of hair, is the feisty Javier Milei, Argentina’s new president. There is no other way to account for this rich country’s protracted disastrous collapse except seventy-five years of intractable, half-assed Peronista socialism that drained the nation’s will to live. Mr. Milei has started a mass eviction of bureaucrats and the departments they infest, and massive de-regulation of business. The place might actually wake up and start doing business again. A hundred years ago, it was one of the world’s upcoming leading nations before it fell under Juan and Eva Peron’s spell.

     China is in terrible financial straits. Uncle Xi managed to paper it over for a few years, but the math is remorseless. Prediction: China’s upside-down property market finally induces a banking collapse. The many millions of swindled Chinese savers try to topple the CCP. In desperation, Uncle Xi kicks off a war to get control over wealthy Taiwan. Dissension in the People’s Liberation Army mirrors unrest among the civilian population. The Taiwan offensive quickly fails and all of China falls into regional conflict. The rest of the world looks on in wonder and nausea.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/29/patrick-lawrence-the-mess-they-made-of-2023/

The Mess They Made of 2023

Abroad and at home, ideology ruled the U.S.  

Let us consider together the year gone past and arrive at some conclusions as to where it leaves us as we enter upon another. We can begin with two recent events that, to the naked eye, have nothing to do with one another. 

The first of these concerns what the Biden regime calls Operation Prosperity Guardian. The Pentagon described this last week as a coalition of 20–odd countries that have agreed to assist the U.S. to protect commercial traffic in the Red Sea from drone attacks mounted by Houthi rebels in Yemen, which — look at the map — chokes off the southern end of this key maritime passage. 

O.K., now let us turn our ever-nimble minds to another of last week’s news events.

Last Tuesday, Dec. 19, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified from running for president in the state’s Republican primary when this vote is held next year. It was a 4–to–3 decision in a court whose seven members were all appointed by Democratic governors. Citing the 14th Amendment, the judges found that Trump was guilty of participating in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when demonstrators protested the official election result the previous November and made their way, to their own apparent surprise, into the legislative chambers of the U.S. Congress. 

Distant as these developments may seem from one another, I read them as two halves of a whole. If we consider them this way, they tell us just where we are as 2023 gives way to 2024. As we examine the details, the story told is one of imperial decline abroad and institutional decay at home. 

It may not be immediately evident that the two are connected, but the one reflects the other, in my view. The imperium is collapsing, the imperium rots from within: This is our circumstance, in nothing less than black and white, as what is truly an annus horribilis draws to a close.

Lumbering Giant

You have to count Operation Prosperity Guardian a misbegotten creature from the start. If Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wanted to advertise the selfish narcissism of late-imperial America and its utter disregard for “the rest,” the Global South, the non–West, or whatever one wishes to call the global majority, he could not have chosen a better name. 

Topographic map of Red Sea. (Eric Gaba, Sting, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Coalitions have been the going thing in Washington for decades, of course. America must have coalitions to veil its hegemonic conduct. Even if these are typically not “coalitions of the willing” so much as coalitions of the coerced, Washington has usually succeeded in pulling together some kind of motley crew. 

Not this time, it seems. At least eight of the nations Austin cited in his head count last week decline to be named, leaving open the question whether these enlistees actually exist. The foot-shuffling among those named is impossible to miss. 

We favor freedom of navigation, the French say with brave originality, and we already operate in the Red Sea. So is France listed among Austin’s committed recruits.

The Italians responded to Austin’s invitation by saying they will send a frigate to the region to protect Italian shipowners who ask for assistance. The Spanish said they will participate only in NATO–led or European Union-led operations: In other words, no thank you, Secretary Austin. 

Etc. 

Predictably, client states such as Bahrain and nations part of the Anglosphere —Britain and Canada — are the only ones un-ambivalently onboard. Norway and the Netherlands said they would send a few naval officers to Manama — a ringing endorsement if ever there was one. 

There is the related question of what Operation Prosperity Guardian can actually get done. The U.S. has not so far retaliated against the Houthis, apparently out of fear of widening the Israel–Gaza crisis into a regional war. 

The Houthis have to date mounted 100–plus attacks on ships sailing the Red Sea, news reports tell us. They are firing drones they make for $2,000 each. In response the U.S. Navy is trying to shoot them down with missiles that cost $1 million to more than $4 million a copy.  

None of this is to suggest that the Red Sea situation is some grand turn in history’s wheel. No, it is more in the way of an illustrative tableau in which the U.S. features as the lumbering giant — weighted down with expensive technology it cannot afford to use and surrounded by court mandarins who tire of the imperial court.  

What Happened in Denver

I rarely read and never thought I would quote the Republican–American, the Waterbury, Connecticut, daily that rivals the New Hampshire Union Leader for its crackpot conservatism. But I came across a copy of the Republican–American in a diner the day after the Colorado Supreme Court decision, and I actually bought the paper after reading “A real assault on democracy,” its lead editorial. 

Here is some of what it said:

“Americans should be thanking the Colorado Supreme Court for spelling out as clearly as possible the modern left-wing [sic] conception of democracy. To this cohort of Americans — animated by the idea that their opposition to Donald Trump grants them unchecked moral authority — preserving democratic rule means ensuring, by any means necessary, the people vote the right way. In other words, democracy is so sacred that it must be protected from the voters. Authoritarianism is so dangerous that it must be proactively employed to stop potential authoritarians…. 

In its 4–3 opinion, the majority ruled that the court somehow possesses the authority to determine, absent a criminal conviction, that former Mr. Trump [sic] committed insurrection and therefore is barred from running for president under the U.S. Constitution….

I cannot improve on the Republican–American’s account of what happened in Denver last week. Trump is convicted of nothing, but judges in solemn black robes rule him guilty of a major crime anyway. It is indeed as they have it in Waterbury: Liberals, self-licensed to break the law while invoking the law, are destroying the American judiciary. 

And this seems to be far from over. Maine’s secretary of state, one Shenna Bellows, is to rule this week as to whether her state, following Colorado’s lead, should bar Trump from running next year. You have to love it that the corporate press has already edited out the fact that Trump has not been found guilty of any crime. 

I was cheered to find the editorial writers at the Republican–American using the term “liberal authoritarianism,” as they do elsewhere in the piece. I had thought this phrase was limited to commentators such as your columnist and publications such as Consortium News. 

This is important, it seems to me. When a provincial daily owned by the same family for 113 years exhibits so clear a grasp of the American dynamic as it is in 2023, it follows that more people than you may think have a perfectly clear idea of what is driving the dissolution and decay they see all around them.

Meddling in Taiwan 

I cannot imagine what President Joe Biden’s national security people tell themselves as they review the state of U.S. foreign policy, so god-awful a mess they have made of it. Relations with China as 2023 opened were the worst in decades, but we could at least speak of relations. 

By midyear, as the Biden regime escalated its meddling in the Taiwan Strait, announced technology embargoes intended to sabotage China’s economic development and insisted that a stray weather balloon was an espionage craft, there were no relations to speak of. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, now consider it an accomplishment when they can get the Chinese simply to talk to them. Heck of a job, Tony. Heck of a job, Jakie. 

Proxy War in Ukraine

Having sunk more than $100 billion into the proxy war in Ukraine, the policy cliques now inch toward admitting all of it has been wasted in the cause of a failed misadventure. Relations with Moscow are truly nonexistent now, apart from what back-channeling may occur out of public view. After a year of foolish errors and misjudgments across both oceans, then, America has no productive relations with the two leading non–Western powers.

The narrative now emerging in Washington — I read this in The New York Times the other day — is that, yes, Washington’s open support for the genocide in Gaza has left it drastically isolated but that the world is with America in the Ukraine case. What nonsense. The great majority of humanity, as measured by population or a count of nations, stands as opposed to the U.S. for provoking and backing the proxy war in Ukraine as it does for its support of Israel’s barbarity.

The much-advertised frame defining Biden’s foreign policies — I will not call it a principle because it merely poses as one — is that the world is divided between democracies and autocracies and it is America’s duty to lead the former against the latter. We do not hear much anymore about this binary because it, too, proved a flop in 2023. Tony and Jake seem to find the theme too embarrassing to mention at this point — especially given that America is increasingly autocratic. 

Precluding Thought 

But we should consider the implications of this way of divvying up humanity in so simplistic a fashion. What does it tell us?

To me it sheds bright light on the extent to which ideology — liberal ideology, I mean — is the sole source of thinking among the Washington policy cliques. And I have just written incorrectly: The core purpose of ideology is to preclude all need of thinking of any kind.  

Ideology determines all. This is the reality with which the year now passing leaves us: Ours is an era ruled by unthinking ideologues. We have seen these past 12 months that there is no reference to law or — as the Israel–Gaza abomination reveals all too starkly — any notion of humanity or common decency. 

And it is the same at home as it is abroad. We can consider it this way: When the U.S. and its allies send the Kyiv regime cluster bombs and depleted uranium in defense of “freedom” and “democracy,” it is the foreign policy analogue of the Colorado Supreme Court breaking the law in the name of the law, just as the Waterbury Republican–American had it last week. 

With this ruling, can it any longer be denied that the Biden regime and the rest of the Democratic elite have made profligate use of the judiciary this past year to keep Donald Trump out of the 2024 election? Is there any longer any discussion that the cases against Trump are sheer politics and have nothing to do with law?

In keeping with this, one of the worst features of the year on the domestic side has been the corruption of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to protect Biden from being impeached for his very apparent if not yet proven participation in his son’s influence-peddling schemes with foreign clients. 

As I have argued severally in this space and elsewhere, when the judiciary lapses into corruption a nation lists toward failed-state status.   

Creeping censorship morphed into a censorship regime in the course of 2023. In the autumn the Twitter Files revealed the extent to which the liberal machine has collaborated with Silicon Valley, systematically and for many years, to suppress dissent in the name of “moral clarity.” 

On July 4, of all days, a district court in Louisiana barred the White House and a long list of other federal agencies from all contacts with social media companies if the intent is to intimidate or otherwise coerce Twitter, Google, Facebook and other such platforms into deleting, suppressing, or in any way obscuring content protected as free speech, to paraphrase a key passage in the ruling. 

Ideology & Hubris  

Believe it or not, the Biden regime is fighting the Louisiana ruling with no shred of shame or embarrassment. This is ideology in action. And in my read, the years of attacks on free speech now prove the mulch from which sprouts the rampant suppression of the rights of those who stand in favor of the Palestinian cause. 

Ideology and hubris, not very distant cousins to one another, have been evident features of U.S. foreign policy for may years. This year put us on notice that they now rule without challenge. A frightened elite lacking in all vision can neither find its way out of the messes it has made nor retreat to allow voices to those with dynamic perspectives nor restore the moral superiority it has squandered—such as this last may have been.  

And as it is abroad, so it is at home. As I have heard over various dinner tables lately, the 2024 elections are very likely to prove a pandemonium. Can they be otherwise, given the rule of law may have so little to do with how they are conducted?      

“What I keep coming back to is the thought that none of us was raised or prepared to live in an Insane World,” a reader wrote recently in a comment thread. How very true this seems at the end of 2023. But we alive now are not the first to live in a condition of insanity. And others — sometimes, once in a while — have found their way beyond it.

Comments to article:

" It would seem Patrick that anyone who dare raise truth, rational policy, intelligent and humane relations with other nations is banned and shunned in the White House and anywhere near the circles of power. Thus, it is left to not just mediocrities but the insane: Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Austin and the Nulands of this world to chart the course of disaster. Hannah Arendt was so right the banality of evil is epitomized by this lot! Regrettably, too not one Western leader has the courage to name the American rot to the face of Biden and his ship of fools and tell them to go to hell! "

" No one in this country has “found our way beyond it” Mr. Lawrence. I fully anticipate war in our country this coming year. I doubt either Trump or any Dem will be elected. Insider trading, extortion, coercion, untried executions, pedophilia, trafficking, perjury, murder, sexual predators, bribery, tax evasion, selling information to foreign governments, harboring illegal foreign nationals, enabling foreign interference in our elections, drug trafficking, genocide with the employment of corrupt pharmaceutical giants, genocide by way of denied health care for seniors via government sanctioned Medicare Advantage, what else? That is the short description of what rules our country. Al Capone was a pansie in comparison."

....

https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/27/health-care-as-wealth-care-in-america/

Health Care as Wealth Care in America

It’s not always better to run things for profit and for maximum return on investment. Consider this snippet I saw in my email feed this AM from CNN:

Private equity firms have been taking over hospitals, nursing homes and other health care delivery systems in recent years, and a new study finds the trend is making care riskier for patients. Researchers examined how often patients experienced certain adverse outcomes at hospitals before they were bought by private equity firms and after — and found that rates of hospital-acquired complications for patients increased by 25% at hospitals after they were purchased. The study doesn’t answer how exactly private equity ownership diminishes care, but one of its authors said that previous research shows these kinds of acquisitions are often linked to staff cuts and replacing doctors and nurses with lower-paid employees.

Who knew that cutting doctors and nurses and replacing them with lower-paid, less experienced staff might have an impact on health outcomes? Color me shocked.

Meanwhile, roughly 100 million Americans struggle with some form of medical-related debt, and medical debts remain the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in America.

Back in 2013, I wrote the following article on the joys of health care in America. A decade later, matters and outcomes are only getting worse.

Americans generally, and politicians in particular, proudly proclaim that we live in “the greatest” country. But how should we measure the greatness of a country? I’d suggest that quality of life should be a vitally important measure.

And what is more fundamental to quality of life than ready access to health care? When you’re sick or suffering, you should be able to see a medical specialist. And those costs should be — wait for it — free to you. Because health care is a fundamental human right that transcends money. Put succinctly, the common health is the commonwealth. And we should use the common wealth to pay for the common health.

Here’s the truth: We all face the reality of confiscatory taxation. If you’re like me, you pay all sorts of taxes. Federal, state, and local income taxes. Property taxes. School taxes. Social security. State lotteries are a regressive tax aimed at the poor and the gullible. We pay these taxes, and of course some for health care as well (Medicare/Medicaid), amounting to roughly 30 percent of our income (or higher, depending on your tax bracket, unless you’re super-rich and your money comes from dividends and capital gains, then you pay 15 percent or lower: see Romney, Mitt).

Yet despite this tax burden, medical care for most of us remains costly and is usually connected somehow to employment (assuming you have a good job that provides health care benefits). Even if you have health care through your job, there’s usually a substantial deductible or percentage that you have to pay out-of-pocket.

America, land of the free! But not free health care. Pay up, you moocher! And if you should lose your job or if you’re one of the millions of so-called underinsured … bankruptcy.

Health care is a moral issue, but our leaders see it through a business/free market lens. And this lens leads to enormous moral blind spots. One example: Our colleges and universities are supposed to be enlightened centers of learning. They educate our youth and help to create our future. Higher Ed suggests a higher purpose, one that has a moral center — somewhere.

But can you guess the response of colleges and universities to Obamacare? They’re doing their level best to limit adjunct professors’ hours to fewer than thirty per week. Why? So they won’t be obligated by law to provide health care benefits to these adjuncts.

Adjuncts are already underpaid; some are lucky to make $3000 for each course they teach. Now colleges and universities are basically telling them, “Tough luck, Adjunct John Galt. If you want medical benefits, pay for health insurance yourself. And we’re limiting your hours to ensure that you have to.”

So, if Adjunct John Galt teaches 10 courses a year (probably at two or three institutions of “higher” learning) and makes $30,000, he then faces the sobering reality of dedicating one-third of this sum to purchasing private health insurance. If that isn’t a sign of American greatness, I don’t know what is.

I groan as much as the next guy when I pay my taxes. But I’d groan a lot less if I knew my money was funding free health care for all (including me and mine). Commonwealth for the common health. With no death panels in sight.

As “Dirty Harry” said in a different context, “I know what you’re thinking.” Free health care for all is simply too expensive. We say this even as we spend a trillion dollars a year on national defense and homeland security, to include the funding of 16 intelligence agencies to watch over us.

A healthy republic that prides itself on “greatness” should place the health of its citizens first. That we don’t is a cause for weeping — and it should be a cause for national soul-searching.

Comment to article:

" 2024 will mark 50 years since I graduated from medical school (MD, UT Memphis, 1974). Over that half century, I have watched as the rapacious and anti-Human corporatists have absorbed “health care” in the US. I had my own private practice for 30 years (Ophthalmology and have enough credentials to wall-paper a small office building). but was unable to withstand declining reimbursements and sky-rocketing overhead as a solo practitioner. I have taught in several different medical schools (2 MD and 1 DO) and have witnessed the capture and perversion of the field by pirate capitalism. The entire Medical Industrial Complex has become centered on disease creation and maintenance to enhance corporate bottom lines, corporatists’ fat bonuses, government bureaucrats’ power and budgets, and the ivory tower academics who feed the system with properly indoctrinated physician cogs for the machine.
The system is rotten from the head down and, IMO, not capable of being reformed. It is crashing as I type.
I believe that some type of cooperative healthcare system such as Medicare would be ideal on paper, but our existing piratical socioeconomic structure in Amerika can never – ever – deliver anything approaching “fair and equitable” much less one that is centered on Human needs. We do NOT need access to more of what we have. We need a completely new, holistic approach to health and healing. Allopathic medicine has sadly failed to deliver and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of iatrogenic deaths a year.
I advise all of my patients (still working, but within Alt Med – cannabis medicine) to avoid white coats and blue lights
Bill… Thanks for speaking out! "