Taking Stock

We are headed towards a fall of extremely “interesting times,” only sadly there may be no future in which our successors will be able to pour over the entrails of this incipient catastrophe to discover what happened.

So, where are we on this steep curve hellwards?

There is a fraction more aid getting into Gaza, but it is inefficiently delivered (air drops often succeed in killing more people); it amounts to only a trickle where a flood is required; and what falls often ends up in the hands of Israeli-instigated criminal gangs.

Recent European promises to recognize Palestine - soon - are cynical in the extreme, since the numbers of dead through starvation, primarily, and outright murder will be astronomical by then.

We can take small comfort from the chorus of Johnny-come-latelies who suddenly find they are not quite so cool as they thought and now have to own up to being grossly complicit in genocide, and who search desperately for forms of words that will make them seem a little less ugly and stupid than they are.

We can hope that a rising wave of protest from hundreds of senior Israeli army and political figures may have some impact on the odious Netanyahu (and his principal, creepy and possibly Mossad-blackmailed sponsor, D.T.), and that the crashing Israeli economy, the growing military self-confidence of Iran (to the North) and Yemen (to the South), the flight of Israelis from Israel, the increasing preparedness of the Global South and even countries in the North to take active measures that negatively affect Israeli trade, will spell the end of this hideous Western experiment in late colonialism and regional control.

In the proxy war by US and its Western vassals against Russia over Ukraine, the exchange of nuclear threats between the US and Russia has reached unprecedented levels and because the ability to substantiate threats with material action is critical to any kind of political or military credibility, we are right to be concerned.

In the past I have been inclined to cut some slack in my judgement of what would otherwise have seemed unwise comments by former Russian President and now vice-chair of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, because a large part of the responsibility for the current situation is rooted in Western underestimation of Russian strength, in Western blindness to the dangers of its own ideological neoliberal cage and the false confidence and self-congratulation to which it has given rise.

So somebody has had to try to introduce Western politicians to the real world (one that now includes Oreshniks in range of Ukrainian and European targets).

More recently, D.T. has embarked on a rhetorical odyssey in which his own words (“words can have dangerous consequences”) constitute precisely the lesson that D.T. needs to learn - the daily vomit of TruthSocial gutter talk is in itself a major threat to global security. He constantly criticizes Russia for Ukraine, totally ignoring the reality that Russian conditions or terms have been transparent, particularly since Putin’s speech last summer when he spelt them out with maximum clarity. Neither Trump nor any Western leader has the intelligence, courage or the imagination to actually address these directly.

Instead, Trump massages the lie that nobody knows what Russia really wants, or makes up stories about what Russia wants - most recently stating that Russia wants all of Ukraine, which is a mischievous and silly, totally unsubstantiated claim.

Then in an escalating exchange that included Medvedev’s entirely sensible reminder to the West of Russia’s “Dead Hand” nuclear policy, in which a Russian nuclear strike is organically scripted into Russian nuclear defense in the event of a Western nuclear attack, D.T. and his madcap generals, including “peace” envoy Kellogg, has gone typically OTT, threatening to send US nuke subs into waters close to Russia (where Russia will be more easily able to detect and destroy them), or sending nuclear capable gravity bombs to six NATO bases in Europe (including, of course, the U.K.) and threatening to destroy Kaliningrad (very well defended, with nuclear defenses, by Russia and which be a certain trigger to the end of the planet).

Trump has created extremely dangerous traps for himself on Russia, a conflict in which it is increasingly clear to me that the US is incapable of winning. One consequent worry is that in order to appease the neocon morons in Congress who appear to be running the asylum in the absence of any real leadership, Trump will agree, with Israel, to once again attack Iran (no matter that the last time he did that a couple of months back, Iran took out the US major communications hub in Doha - but don’t let anyone else know that!) which, if and when it happens, will likely bring in the CIA HTS terrorist government in Syria to the south, Yemen to the south, Azerbaijan and Armenia to the north, and therefore, most assuredly requiring the active involvement of Russia (which cannot afford its enemies to establish a totally new front east of Ankara) and China which needs to continue to access Iranian energy.

The Trump Tariff Nonsense has provided abundant proof to all parties that the US is under dangerous, erratic and probably demented leadership, that this leadership sees the entire world as an enemy to the US goal of unrivalled hegemony, and that it is time for the rest of the world to take a stand on the unceasing and toxic mixture of existential threat and meaningless drivel that emanates daily from Washington.