Well put together, this is an important reiteration of the mindset gleaned from what could be iterations of an MSM hack, as the beliefs are the tide marks of the collective consciousness of the establishment, or as DR Shiva says, "The Swarm."
In short, it props up the ignorance of the West of the changes in geopolitics and how in particular warfare has changed in favour of "The Sword and Sandals Brigade".
It also opens up accusations of arrogance and denial in not illuminating the facts of context and the epigenetics of the Western disease of backing the wrong horse. By that I mean the colonial mindset of superiority. This bifurcation is exemplified by the BRICS which is not to say that this is the answer to all problems of our civilisation but it is diminishing Western hegemony and in theory, might bring about more peace.
Western myopia if we are to accept that it is so wrong in many ways has to learn to live, warts and all with itself or the consequences for collaborating with genocide will always be the human stain.
Thanks for the comment, Robin. I think we are largely in agreement. The establishment of course has a belief system, a hierarchy of what is important and what is not, it just doesn't own up to it and thus allow it to be scrutinised. Arrogance and denial - indeed. I tried to stay polite in my deconstruction of Sawers' analysis, but I could easily have used these words.
Nation states have become the veiled persona of corporations, from the first Italian and Dutch entities to the empire building East India company. The discussion of nation states is like the Greek gods, equally mythical and as you say inhuman. They represent a kind of place holder or buffer, to control an internal population, whilst allowing for the
exploitation of an externalised one, by the machine of the corporation. The language of government is the of the corpoation.
La Via Campesina, in their introductory documentary explain the process of these new global corporate entities as exploiting both the internal and external populations giving us an opportunity to find solidarity despite the nation state, to perceive a global corporate oligarchy, to find a diverse local community, based in land use. Our biggest barrier to the decomposition of these structures is the status inferred to those embedded in it, so clear in the quote.
Thanks Joel. I couldn't agree more. The state and the interests of commerce ie corporations are synonymous. We need to keep calling it out, as you have done, and stop seeing the state as the ultimate arbiter and indeed protector which it evidently is not. Thanks for the comment.
Those of us carrying on with our lives without much time to analyse have to trust what we are told. In fact there's a culture where you are expected to trust your Lord and Master knows what they are doing! Even more so if you are in the armed forces.
🤔Like belief in God
Now that reminds me about the joke about honours in Yes, Minister CMG stands for Call Me God etc.
What we are discovering is that our government is as clueless as we are!
Thanks Mary. Government relies on you trusting them to do the right thing. Only absoute transparency is the way to test that trust and of course that we don't have and won't have. Government has to preserve its mysterious aura of omniscience. It's a racket that we all enable.
Such dangerous and arrogant thinking seems to permeate the Western narrative of this horror show. Israel's assessment of both Iran and Hizbollah being a case in point, and this is a highly dangerous and incorrect assertion, goading them to further atrocities and ultimately leading to a retaliation on a massive scale, as has been stated clearly. Any sign of hesitancy is taken as weakness by Israel.
Thanks Anders. I intend to do so though am no historian. I will discuss Israel's wars with Daniel Levy on a new podcast to be released soon. I suspect that will go into some of the history.
Thanks for the well-written and eye-opening decryption of what looked to be, on the surface, a measured and unassailable presentation of facts. The one thing I found I wanted to hear more about was this passage:
"The text is very much about geo-politics, that familiar discourse of what states do. The dominant descriptor is the name or capital of the state, Israel, Iran, Damascus etc. People’s names are mentioned but they tend to be subsidiary. All the individuals referred to are in any case leaders or part of leadership elites."
The more I thought about this, the more I wanted to know the "who?" behind all these mechanations. You mentioned the personal level of destruction - the 40,000 dead - but here I am talking about the actual individuals in government taking all these disastrous decisions for the "good" of the rest of us. What are their motivations? What do they hope to gain or prevent? It is hard to imagine they are free of biases, ambitions, fears, and grudges - how are these coming to bear on these momentous choices? When they work so hard to hide behind the mask of a state, are they hiding something or are they just diffusing the accountability for their decisions?
Thanks for the comment, Bill. What excellent questions! Unfortunately thanks to the opacity of government we have little idea who is making these decisions and what drives them. This tends to be the preserve of historians with access to diaries, private letters etc. Of course, we know that the 'leaders' - Biden, Starmer, Netanyahu - take the ultimate decisions, but who frames their choices, who has their ear, what are their prejudices? We can guess, but we don't know.
Purely propaganda but for who? Sure FT reader or writers wouldn't buy it, isreal is about to get it's arse kicked, in the last 20 years everything changed militarily. The western army's and isreal have become police forces suppressing local populations for corporate interests, we think a gunboat will do the trick? War has moved on integrated drone and missiles system missiles that travel at 2500mph, add to that no mention of Russia's involvement and common enemies, Russia helped guide missile though there satellites. Who exactly wants WW3 is it arms companies? There increased sales will last 72 minutes!
Well, fair point Nigel. The beneficiaries of war are all too clear in the soaring share prices of arms companies. I also agree that war has moved on - dramatically. Israel is extremely fast to exploit new technology such as AI targeting. This only increases its - already enormous - military advantage, a huge factor no doubt in its calculations.
It's AI is already being circumvented by humans, for instance Hezbollah created dummy missile sites to fool AI, it's military depend on expensive weapons that the West is no geared to send as we don't have a war economy or a state capitalist one like Russia and China. I read a book called I think called "Threat" about cold war military it basically said that conventional war would last about 6 months as Russian equipment broke down and America High tech stuff failed
Thank you that was really interesting, I think this demonstrates a lack of expert ‘generalists’ or those who can assess something holistically. Really great article.
In effect, governments like organisations who have lobbyists become their own propaganda machines delivering generous sound bites that are replete with the jargon of banality and little else.
This demonstrates more than anything that governments are so entrenched and self serving that have become indeed unfit for purpose. Even the humans amongst them are in effect mechanised to deliver that banality and ineffectiveness.
Is it any wonder that those with even half a conscience are forced to become outriders or leave in order to find their good governance and process elsewhere.
Thanks Shernaz. Indeed the rest of us are driven to be marginalised 'outsiders' which in an awful way helps reaffirm government's claim to be reasonable and hard headed.
Well put together, this is an important reiteration of the mindset gleaned from what could be iterations of an MSM hack, as the beliefs are the tide marks of the collective consciousness of the establishment, or as DR Shiva says, "The Swarm."
In short, it props up the ignorance of the West of the changes in geopolitics and how in particular warfare has changed in favour of "The Sword and Sandals Brigade".
It also opens up accusations of arrogance and denial in not illuminating the facts of context and the epigenetics of the Western disease of backing the wrong horse. By that I mean the colonial mindset of superiority. This bifurcation is exemplified by the BRICS which is not to say that this is the answer to all problems of our civilisation but it is diminishing Western hegemony and in theory, might bring about more peace.
Western myopia if we are to accept that it is so wrong in many ways has to learn to live, warts and all with itself or the consequences for collaborating with genocide will always be the human stain.
Thanks for the comment, Robin. I think we are largely in agreement. The establishment of course has a belief system, a hierarchy of what is important and what is not, it just doesn't own up to it and thus allow it to be scrutinised. Arrogance and denial - indeed. I tried to stay polite in my deconstruction of Sawers' analysis, but I could easily have used these words.
I appreciate your decorum in this global scenario, and your diplomatic background is undoubtedly a boon to your ability to do this.
I just wonder how long we the people, the 8 billion can sit back and take the bullying?
Nation states have become the veiled persona of corporations, from the first Italian and Dutch entities to the empire building East India company. The discussion of nation states is like the Greek gods, equally mythical and as you say inhuman. They represent a kind of place holder or buffer, to control an internal population, whilst allowing for the
exploitation of an externalised one, by the machine of the corporation. The language of government is the of the corpoation.
La Via Campesina, in their introductory documentary explain the process of these new global corporate entities as exploiting both the internal and external populations giving us an opportunity to find solidarity despite the nation state, to perceive a global corporate oligarchy, to find a diverse local community, based in land use. Our biggest barrier to the decomposition of these structures is the status inferred to those embedded in it, so clear in the quote.
Thanks Joel. I couldn't agree more. The state and the interests of commerce ie corporations are synonymous. We need to keep calling it out, as you have done, and stop seeing the state as the ultimate arbiter and indeed protector which it evidently is not. Thanks for the comment.
Those of us carrying on with our lives without much time to analyse have to trust what we are told. In fact there's a culture where you are expected to trust your Lord and Master knows what they are doing! Even more so if you are in the armed forces.
🤔Like belief in God
Now that reminds me about the joke about honours in Yes, Minister CMG stands for Call Me God etc.
What we are discovering is that our government is as clueless as we are!
Thanks Mary. Government relies on you trusting them to do the right thing. Only absoute transparency is the way to test that trust and of course that we don't have and won't have. Government has to preserve its mysterious aura of omniscience. It's a racket that we all enable.
Such dangerous and arrogant thinking seems to permeate the Western narrative of this horror show. Israel's assessment of both Iran and Hizbollah being a case in point, and this is a highly dangerous and incorrect assertion, goading them to further atrocities and ultimately leading to a retaliation on a massive scale, as has been stated clearly. Any sign of hesitancy is taken as weakness by Israel.
Agreed. This kind of analysis has taken us to a very dangerous place.
Thanks, well written. Maybe in a further stack you could go more into the history and what needs to done to sort this conflict
Thanks Anders. I intend to do so though am no historian. I will discuss Israel's wars with Daniel Levy on a new podcast to be released soon. I suspect that will go into some of the history.
Thanks you Carne, I wait for
Thanks for the well-written and eye-opening decryption of what looked to be, on the surface, a measured and unassailable presentation of facts. The one thing I found I wanted to hear more about was this passage:
"The text is very much about geo-politics, that familiar discourse of what states do. The dominant descriptor is the name or capital of the state, Israel, Iran, Damascus etc. People’s names are mentioned but they tend to be subsidiary. All the individuals referred to are in any case leaders or part of leadership elites."
The more I thought about this, the more I wanted to know the "who?" behind all these mechanations. You mentioned the personal level of destruction - the 40,000 dead - but here I am talking about the actual individuals in government taking all these disastrous decisions for the "good" of the rest of us. What are their motivations? What do they hope to gain or prevent? It is hard to imagine they are free of biases, ambitions, fears, and grudges - how are these coming to bear on these momentous choices? When they work so hard to hide behind the mask of a state, are they hiding something or are they just diffusing the accountability for their decisions?
Thanks for the comment, Bill. What excellent questions! Unfortunately thanks to the opacity of government we have little idea who is making these decisions and what drives them. This tends to be the preserve of historians with access to diaries, private letters etc. Of course, we know that the 'leaders' - Biden, Starmer, Netanyahu - take the ultimate decisions, but who frames their choices, who has their ear, what are their prejudices? We can guess, but we don't know.
Purely propaganda but for who? Sure FT reader or writers wouldn't buy it, isreal is about to get it's arse kicked, in the last 20 years everything changed militarily. The western army's and isreal have become police forces suppressing local populations for corporate interests, we think a gunboat will do the trick? War has moved on integrated drone and missiles system missiles that travel at 2500mph, add to that no mention of Russia's involvement and common enemies, Russia helped guide missile though there satellites. Who exactly wants WW3 is it arms companies? There increased sales will last 72 minutes!
Well, fair point Nigel. The beneficiaries of war are all too clear in the soaring share prices of arms companies. I also agree that war has moved on - dramatically. Israel is extremely fast to exploit new technology such as AI targeting. This only increases its - already enormous - military advantage, a huge factor no doubt in its calculations.
It's AI is already being circumvented by humans, for instance Hezbollah created dummy missile sites to fool AI, it's military depend on expensive weapons that the West is no geared to send as we don't have a war economy or a state capitalist one like Russia and China. I read a book called I think called "Threat" about cold war military it basically said that conventional war would last about 6 months as Russian equipment broke down and America High tech stuff failed
This seem about right https://www.antiimperialist.news/p/israel-is-nervous?r=ofzvp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Did you see Cohen and O'Brien's article in The Atlantic (and CSIS report) - points to a similar problem of overconfidence: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/how-defense-experts-got-ukraine-wrong/680045/.
Thanks Klaus. Good to hear from you. I will check it out.
Thank you that was really interesting, I think this demonstrates a lack of expert ‘generalists’ or those who can assess something holistically. Really great article.
Thank you!
In effect, governments like organisations who have lobbyists become their own propaganda machines delivering generous sound bites that are replete with the jargon of banality and little else.
This demonstrates more than anything that governments are so entrenched and self serving that have become indeed unfit for purpose. Even the humans amongst them are in effect mechanised to deliver that banality and ineffectiveness.
Is it any wonder that those with even half a conscience are forced to become outriders or leave in order to find their good governance and process elsewhere.
Thanks Carne as ever for your clarity.
Thanks Shernaz. Indeed the rest of us are driven to be marginalised 'outsiders' which in an awful way helps reaffirm government's claim to be reasonable and hard headed.