Sunday, February 25, 2024
A Solution for Gaza
Friday, December 8, 2023
Emergency Media Reset
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” George Orwell
Virtually all the media, even those moderately sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians, refer to the events of 7 October and its aftermath as the war between Israel and Hamas. I tend to cling to the outmoded concept of wars being a way of nations resorting to conflict resolution through military means when diplomatic means have failed, or have never been tried. Sometimes it’s a matter of big just rolling over small, but usually it involves two countries, nations or states. There have been any number of warring factions within larger political entities. From 1948 Israel has existed as a nation, given that recognition by the UN with remarkable international unanimity, although the measure also accorded a Palestinian state, a solution which has never been implemented and one which the current Israeli Government will stop at nothing to prevent.
Gaza is an occupied territory. Since 2006 it has been condoned off and fully controlled by Israel. No ships could arrive; nobody could enter or leave without Israeli approval. Food entering the territory was calculated to not exceed the cumulative minimum caloric levels to avoid starvation of the population. Perhaps the Israelis hoped that the Palestinians would just become depressed and die off. They’ve spared no effort to that end but have not succeeded so they appear to have moved on to the final solution, which meets all the international criteria for genocide.
Our media talk about genocide often, but such talk is usually limited to the big one in Europe in the 1940’s while those in Africa don’t get much mention, just as the slaughter of the Armenians was largely forgotten by the world for a century. This one is there for all to see, although the Israelis did shut down the internet for a while to stop live reports from getting out. More journalists have already been killed in this two month old conflict than in all other recent US wars.
In recent weeks, some hostages on both sides have been released. Each has his or her own story but some Israeli women, upon release, have even expressed gratitude to their captors for their considerate treatment. You might have missed that if your news comes from the major media, just as you may have missed the stories of Israeli troops simply blowing up buildings where Hamas was thought to be holding hostages, killing everyone inside, captors, hostages alike, in order to avoid negotiations with the enemy. Illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank have continued murdering Palestinians with impunity.
In October Josh Paul, Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Military Affairs, resigned saying the Biden Administration’s “blind support for one side “ was leading to policy decisions that were “short-sighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse”.
Israel has been getting a lot of bad press, despite all its MSM and Congressional support, so a propaganda counteroffensive was due.
On December 6th the New York Times published a story containing the following:
“ President Biden condemned the “unimaginable cruelty” of Hamas attackers who raped and mutilated women in Israel on Oct. 7, and he blamed the terrorist group’s refusal to release its remaining female hostages for the breakdown in cease-fire talks. Hamas has rejected the allegations. …
“Survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty,” Biden said. “Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive — of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them.”
“Matt Miller, a State Department spokesman, said that “a number of people believe” that Hamas did not want to release female hostages because of the stories they would tell about how they were treated. But he said he was “not able to speak with a definitive assessment that that is the case.”
This came two months after the Hamas insurrection and as far as I know that brutal attack lasted a day or two, catching the Israelis, always known for their intelligence sophistication and expertise, unprepared. A forty page report has emerged showing that an attack by Hamas was known a year before the attack happened, much as the 9-11 attacks in the US were known and reported by US intelligence services but ignored by President Bush. Was Bibi following the same script? Bush was hoping to have a war on Iraq. He got his excuse, even if it was based on knowing lies. Was this the Netanyahu’s chance to launch the final solution?
I have no way to know whether or not Biden’s allegations hold any truth. Perhaps, but we have heard lurid stories put out by the government of babies being beheaded for which there was no evidence. There is no way to conduct a rage-driven massacre of 1500 people in a gentle humane way, any more than there is a way to humanely bomb a crowded concentration camp holding more than two million people into oblivion.
Meanwhile, the people in northern Gaza were ordered to evacuate to the southern part within 48 hours so that their homes, schools, hospitals and mosques could be destroyed and then, after many arrived, the bombing and artillery attacks started in the south. A cease fire to exchange hostages was arranged for four days then the assault continued, despite Biden’s urging the Israelis to adhere to international law while getting on with their self-defense activities (i.e. slaughter of the Gazans). Saturday Night Live couldn’t make this stuff up. Well, they could, but it would never be aired.
The last time I checked, Biden’s approval rating was 27% and falling. Economists, even some intelligent-seeming ones, are amazed by this, since while inflation has been way up, it is easing and the stock market is making a nice recovery. Unemployment is down as more people are taking second jobs to help with rising costs. None of the experts even consider that the the levels of distrust and disgust with the government are harder to quantify in their charts. As an American who has spent very few of the past fifty years in my native country, it is hard for me to accept that the Americans I knew, who were were mostly decent people regardless of their political affiliation, have nearly all died or mutated into monsters supporting any means to world domination, even genocide if that’s what it takes, but if I look at our political representatives of both major parties, that’s more or less the way it appears. There are occasional signs of hope such as this letter by White House staffers protesting administration policy. May their numbers increase.
***
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Dream Scenarios
1. 1. Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden
are candidates for President in 2024. As
I write, this does appear to be a dream, but it is one shared by the majority
of voters, 77% at last count, in the USA.
I’ve done a cartoon suggesting such an outcome. There are various ways
this could come to pass. One or two of
the dozens of indictments of Trump might stick and Biden’s on-going imitation
of Dr. Strangelove may tank his polling numbers so badly that nominally
Democratic oligarchs will feel the need to pull the plug. That would be the cue for Congressional
Democrats to jump ship in a desperate effort to save their jobs.
2. 2. Palestinians take control of
Libya. It is still too early to tell how
the genocide in Gaza will work out. It
has been going on for a long time but in early October the people in the world’s
largest concentration camp finally put together a major revolt. Was the huge Israeli intelligence failure a
sign of incompetence or were Bibi and company hoping for something bad enough
to be an excuse for ridding themselves of the Palestinians for good? Earlier
instances of Israeli military assaults on Gaza at three- or four-year intervals
were flippantly referred to as “mowing the lawn”. Sometimes even lawn care
specialists can get fed up and opt to nuke the whole yard with Roundup. It is apparent that Bibi and his Defense
Minister Yoev Gallant want the Gazans all dead.
They say as much, except when talking to Joe Biden or Antony Blinken,
who both repeat that the Israelis are only out to get the Hamas terrorists. It has been reported that 1500 Israelis were
killed in the rebellion. The number of Palestinians killed in retaliation is by
now three or four times that but given that the European role models for the
genocide used a ratio of ten to one in killing people deemed collaborators in
the killing of any Nazi soldier, we probably won’t see the slaughter slow down
until the Palestinian death toll reaches 15,000. There were 2,200,000 people living in Gaza. Withholding food, water, medicines and fuel,
as announced by the Minister of Defense, could kill all of them but there might
be some grim regional repercussions which are hard to predict. Suggestions come from both Israeli and
American sources that the Palestinians could be relocated elsewhere, usually
meaning somewhere in Egypt. The
Egyptians want no part of that. I have a
better idea. Since NATO bombed it into
the Stone Age in 2011, Libya has been a failed state, a haven for human traffickers,
slave traders and warring gangs. Palestinians are a clever bunch. If they can build in Gaza under severe
sanctions, they can thrive anywhere, so the UN could relocate those of them who
want to go to Libya. It may not be their
ancestral home but it does have a small population living over a sea of oil.
They could probably restore the country to a functioning state and after
generations of resisting Israeli attacks, they should have no trouble fighting
off the French and English coming to steal the oil.
3. 3. Donald Trump elected Speaker of the
House. This outcome may have already
been derailed by the election of little-known Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson
to the post after four or five previous candidates failed to garner the needed
votes. Will Johnson last? We shall see.
He is seditious enough to gather the full support of the GOP, but such
tendencies will assure a compact Democratic opposition when legislation needs
to be passed. The Speaker does not have to be a member of congress if I recall
correctly. Trump has a long history of
getting people to do things which are good for him while being against their own
interests. That’s practically the job description of a Speaker of the
House. His respect for law, as a
concept, may be even lower than that of Mitch McConnell, his respect for truth is
in the range of ex-Speaker Paul Ryan, and his personal depravity no worse than
that of another former speaker, Dennis Hastert. On a combination of the three
traits mentioned above, Trump’s performance would seem better than those of
Newt Gingrich. While Trump is despised
by a slim majority of Americans, and both feared and ridiculed by people all
over the world, his political instincts have been undervalued. He did, after all, perform two political
miracles. First, he managed to outdo Hillary Clinton in her obsequious
pandering to Israel, a feat unmatched in the annals of fairy tales. He followed
that by winning an unwinnable election against the same Hillary Clinton, former
first lady, Senator and Secretary of State, who had the support of legions of
women thrilled at the prospect of seeing a woman president. Trump could
probably control Republican congressmen enough to get them to vote to pass
legislation, no matter how repugnant, but in troubled times it might not be
worse than having no functioning legislature at all, relying on a corrupt and
senile President and a Supreme Court, still unencumbered by any Code of Ethical
Standards, to keep the wheels of government turning. There are some worrisome aspects
to a Speaker of the House Trump, beyond the mundane political considerations of
a radical GOP platform getting a boost. The Speaker of the House is third in
line to the Presidency so if both the president and the Vice President were to
die in office, the Speaker would become President. Only a few years ago Trump
boasted that he could shoot a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue in broad
daylight and his supporters would still support him. Biden already has other vulnerabilities,
and the Secret Service agents may have lost their fervor to protect him after
his dogs haven bitten eleven of them.
Kamala Harris would be well advised to stay away from Fifth Avenue for
the next twelve months. Trump’s felony
indictments may keep him off the ballot in enough states to prevent him from
being re-elected but he could have another path to the presidency.
Sweet dreams!
Thursday, September 28, 2023
A Tale of Two Nations
In late August of 2023 I celebrated the fiftieth anniversary
of my emigration from the USA to Italy.
Most of my grandparents or great-grandparents had made the Atlantic
crossing in the opposite direction in the mid-19th Century, also seeking a
better life on the other side.
By now my views and conclusions may be viewed by younger
readers as the tedious laments of a grumpy old man but I have come to
appreciate my extraordinary good luck in being born in the USA just as its
unexpectedly brief golden age of middle class expansion was getting up to
speed. While the US suffered a significant
number of casualties in WWII, the war had little material consequences in the
country other than bringing more women into the workforce and lifting the
economy out of the Great Depression. For most of us growing up in the suburbs
it was a relatively carefree and unrestrained life. Having no awareness of the transient nature
of life, I may not have appreciated it at the time, but we had a serene and
healthy environment. We thought that was
normal, sometimes even lamenting in adolescence that it was boring,
Our good fortune extended to being able to attend good
colleges and graduate schools without having wealthy families or working
mothers and without incurring student debt.
The US may have been bland at that time but despite occasional heated
arguments between Republicans, who ran the banks and the car dealerships, and
the Democrats, who were often union members or other undesirables, there was a
shared pride in citizenship and belief in “the American Dream”, a concept
rooted in political freedoms and economic opportunity.
Some of us who gravitated to the Democratic side were
sarcastic about the Norman Rockwell imagery and the 4th of July parades but
while our tastes and preferences varied, a degree of faith in the fundamental
goodness of the country was widespread.
My own appreciation of the Homeland was always a bit
restrained and when I got to travel abroad, first to Mexico and later to
Europe, it was seriously compromised.
Traveling around Europe for a few months following graduation from
college and active duty in the Army, I realized that no matter what blessings
America had bestowed on me, the prospect of living the rest of my life there
was a bad dream. I was fascinated by all
the European countries I visited, each with its own language, food, art,
architecture and landscape. Italy was
not the most relaxing place in Europe, but I found the beauty of its cities,
its countryside and its people to be magnetic.
Upon returning to the US to study architecture, I was able
to audit classes in Italian. I hardly
excelled at it but it moved me along the path to becoming an Italophile. A
further push came from an Italian-American roommate who taught me most of what
little I knew about cooking. His mother
was born to a family from the Province of Parma. At that time, New York was full of
Italian movies which drew me in as no cinema had before or since.
I might have adapted to living in the US, and almost did
while living in San Francisco for a year, but once again my nearly supernatural
good fortune intervened. By pure chance
I met a young Italian while on vacation in Rome who had all the Italian traits
that I had been so intrigued by: beauty, personality, taste, intelligence, and
independence of mind. Also, lots of
character. In short order she came to
the US where we were married and fifty years ago we moved to Italy with our two
very young daughters. It was a big cultural adjustment, most of it enjoyable.
Where the US had a shared patriotism and belief in its form
of government, Italy had little of that.
Italy had remained largely a loose confederation of city states, each
with its own history and traditions. The country had only been unified around
the time of the US Civil War and unification did for much of the southern regions
what the potato famine had done for Ireland, i.e., it brought poverty and mass
emigration. While Rome was a wonderful
place to be in the 70’s, there was an uncomfortable amount of violence between
the youth of the far left and the far right.
Terrorism emerged then, long before it was felt in the US.
I grew up in a rather anti-Catholic atmosphere. It was never so in a violent way, just a veiled
prejudice which showed itself in a sense of disdain and distrust. Marrying a serious Catholic required some
adjustment on my part and brought significant attitude modification to my
family. Regardless of my upbringing, I
did come to recognize the Roman Catholic Church as the unifying element in
Italian life, much as the allegiance to the flag was in the US. Almost everybody in Italy was Catholic and
even those who were not were bathed in the culture and rituals of the
Church. There were devout Catholics,
ex-Catholics, priest-hating Catholics, going through the motions Catholics,
good, bad, rich and poor ones but at least on major holidays and weddings, they
showed up together in the same place and to some extent tried to conform to a
modicum of decorum imparted to them by their priests in childhood. For at least one hour they would put aside
their personal postures and interests and join in a communal act of devotion.
While 1973 saw the birth of our second child and our move to
Italy, in the public sphere the news was taken up by the hearings on the
criminal activities of President Nixon.
His Vice President Spiro Agnew had been investigated for corruption and
forced to resign in time for him not to accede to the presidency upon Nixon’s
resignation. The year also subsequently
appeared in many economists’ graphs marking the downturn of median incomes and
the start of the permanent growth of the wealth gap.
The US has often been called the most religious of the western countries because it has more regular church goers. While most of the people who (voluntarily) emigrated to the US before the mid-Twentieth Century came from Europe, once an almost exclusively a Judeo-Christian territory, the Founding Fathers were often deists, men of the Enlightenment whose speech often mentioned “the Will of God” or “Divine Providence”, but who showed little adherence to any specific religious denomination. The vast number of religious sects tended to create social division and rivalry rather than creating a shared set of religion-based values.
In recent decades, people, often described as liberals, have
made claims that religious teaching has had no place in American law or
American government. Yet for at least
the first two hundred years few citizens of the US would openly challenge The
Ten Commandments or the teachings of Jesus Christ. They might not conform to them, but they
would not deny their validity. Indeed, my
own public school days started with a short reading from the Book of Psalms and
the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States.
Perhaps the most definitive contribution to US culture from a religious movement came from the now despised and ridiculed Puritans, whose rather stern work ethic was a major factor in the nation’s development. However, that mindset was detached from any particular religious denomination early on and often absorbed and internalized by immigrants from all over the world.
Italy and the USA have changed a great deal over the past half century. Both have had their difficulties as well as moments of glory. In the ‘80’s Italy surpassed both France and the UK in terms of GNP to become Europe’s second largest economy, but its success was short lived, undermined by corruption which emerged in the Mani Pulite scandals of 1992. It had been governed by what was unofficially known as the partitocracy, wherein a large collection of theoretically opposed political parties would agree to maintain the status quo and divide the spoils, doing little or nothing. In the aftermath, most of the existing parties, including the Christian Democrats, who ruled Italy for most of the post-war era, went out of existence, while the Communist Party changed its name twice to carry on as today’s Democratic Party.
Over my fifty years mostly here, that seemed to be the low
point, at least until now. Many things
in Italy have improved, mostly through advances in technology rather than by better
government. However, the country seems
to have lost its soul, its direction, and mostly its independence. The Covid pandemic, followed by the proxy war
in Ukraine, have combined to form a new wave of authoritarianism, not seen in
Italy since Mussolini came to power a century ago. In response to corporate and
foreign domination, the most common response has been resignation
and obsequious passivity to the predations of the foreign neo-cons and the
domestic quislings. Italy was the most enthusiastic
participant in the foundation of the European Union but by now there is
widespread though mostly silent frustration that the EU has become one large
Vichy Government, faithfully towing the line of its North Atlantic master.
The US has experienced many ups and downs in the cyclical economy,
with each downturn shifting more resources from the poor to the rich. The epochal event of these past fifty years was
the end of the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It should have been a time for rejoicing and
a peace dividend to improve life across the globe. Instead, the old Cold Warriors could not face
change when they could see how profitable endless war could be. The US had plenty of war hawks throughout the
Cold War, probably more and worse than even those of today. However, at the beginning of the new century a group was formed by Bill
Chrystal and Robert Kagan, calling itself the Project for the New American Century, advocating what both Stalin and Hitler had tried and spectacularly
failed to do, namely conquer and control the entire world by exerting unmatched
military and economic power.
The PNAC has completely dominated US foreign policy for a
quarter century through two Republican and two Democratic administrations. Millions of people around the world have been
killed or displaced by their policies, although it must be admitted that those
millions are far fewer than the millions wiped out by the activities of Stalin,
Hitler or Mao. The new imperialists have
been terribly successful, as three quarters of the countries of the world are
now under US military occupation. Of
course, the US doesn’t use that language.
It is all about mutual defense agreements among allies and friends. If you’re a country with a small population
and a sizable territory, you may prefer to see it that way but just how much
autonomy do you have? And who are you
being protected from? When the US
decides to attack and destroy a country it has taken a disliking toward and it
uses its NATO bases to launch the attack, how much does the country hosting
those bases have to say about it? But
why would the US do anything like that, you ask. You will have to ask a member of PNAC. If I were to be asked, I could only suggest
that the State Department is run by psychopaths. You might better ask a Libyan, an Iraqi or
an Afghan.
In the fifty years since I came to Italy as an American
ex-patriot married into an Italian family, I’ve had an unusual vantage point to
observe the changes in both countries. Italy is the most wonderful place to
live that I know of, if you can make a living here, but the latter part is
difficult, which explains how I came to live in Saudi Arabia for a year or two and
later return to the US for a few years. For all my love of Italy, I’ve continued to
read, speak and work in English most of the time and despite living in a small Umbrian
village, I socialize mostly with the foreign community whose shared language is
English, regardless of their country of origin.
Eighty or ninety percent of our foreign community are
conventionally secular in outlook, with most quietly so, but a vociferous
minority aggressively hostile to the Church, past or present, while
being remarkably tolerant of other failed institutions. They may visit the many glorious churches in
every Italian town or city as they would visit a museum or Disney World. If there is a new faith to replace those that
have faded, it would seem to be a belief in and dedication to good food. Italy is a fine place to adhere to such a
faith since it is so widely shared here.
The secularization of Italy was spearheaded by an unusually
charismatic politician, Marco Pannella, the Secretary of the Partito
Radicale. He was an intense promoter of
direct democracy, i.e., the making of major decisions by public referendums. In this way, both divorce and abortion were
legalized despite the protestations of the Church. He may have even been behind making Roman
Catholicism no longer the official state religion. The effects of these three changes have been
dramatic and not especially positive. While
many unhappy marriages were ended, a relief to most of the people involved,
statistics have shown that widespread divorce increases the number of children
raised in poverty, and that many of the divorced are devastated
economically. For a long time, the birthrate in Italy has
been far below that needed to replace the existing population. Only Spain has a lower birthrate in Europe at present. In the period after the legalization of
abortion, the population crisis has worsened.
As for the detachment of the Church from the State, most
democratically inclined people would agree that this was a step forward. Nonetheless, the most visible result of the
change was the removal of nuns from the hospitals, which they ran rather well. Their administration could be severe, but the
hospitals were orderly and clean. My
recent experiences in Bologna and Umbria have found modern hospitals well run,
especially in Bologna, but the same is not true in some of the other major
cities. One hears grim stories of chaos,
neglect, and violence in the major hospitals of Rome. Even in Bologna, doctors and nurses will tell
you that they are seriously understaffed, and they fear for the future of the
health system.
The Church has changed much more from other causes. Church attendance is sharply down although
there are still many devout Catholics and others continue to go out of habit. There are many churches, but the lack of priests
to run them is much more severe than the lack of parishioners. Standards of comportment imposed by the
priests have been relaxed out of fear that today’s people will no longer accept
limitations on their conduct. Italians
have always been a bit anarchic and the discipline of the Church has been
something of a corrective. The cycle of
sin, confession, and forgiveness has suited the Italian temperament very well
for centuries. That cycle has been
broken and we now see brides arriving at the church as though they just stepped
out of a sleazy discothèque, and pudgy little Lolitas parade around the churches
as if dressed for sale to sex tourists in Bangkok. The men are often little
better. Some show up as if they just climbed
off their tractor, even those who work in offices, with their drooping baggy
pants exhibiting their ass cleavage with
the same lack of inhibition as the women showing off their more attractive
assets.
Marco Pannella was a charming and energetic man, who got
things done. It’s a shame that he wasn’t
born in the US rather than Italy. His
extreme devotion to a government responsive to the will of the people and to
the Constitution could have done a lot more good there.
I mentioned the decline in the US starting in 1973 but Ronald
Reagan’s devastation of the labor movement helped it along. Bill Clinton kept the economy going but his
incarceration of a high percentage of young black men on minor offenses did
vast harm to the social fabric. With the new century came the unrelenting
horror of the Enron Generation and its devotion to making big money with no
regard for neighbors, the country or the environment*. We’ve had a string of four presidents* vying
for the title of the worse US president ever.
It appears that next year we’ll see a presidential election between, in
the red corner, a bloated narcissistic degenerate who believes in nothing other
than the art of the deal, his deal, and maybe a good deal for others rich and
powerful enough to be of use to him, up against, in the blue corner, from the
PNAC wing of the party, an old mafia machine style pol, more or less out of the
Spiro Agnew mould. Unfortunately, he
wasn’t removed when leading the remarkably corrupt Clarence Thomas though his
Senate hearings, nor when he served as chief Democratic cheerleader for the
barbaric and truly unprovoked war on Iraq.
The majority of American citizens want neither of these
candidates, but the two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, or the
Bloods and the Crips, as I choose to call them, want no interference by the
public in selecting their candidates.
There is a long tradition in America of voting for the lesser of two evils. It’s a hard call this time. Both the Bloods and the Crips are trying to
take out the opposing candidate through criminal indictments, a cynical
approach, but reasonable in both cases under the circumstances. Can anyone envisage a way out of this dilemma?
We can only suggest a mutual plea bargain where all criminal charges would be
dropped against both candidates in return for their disqualification to seek
public office.
The multifaceted oligarchy runs the United States and the Congress is a fully owned subsidiary of
the oligarchy. The spoils are divided
among the financial sector, the health and pharmaceutical sector, and the
Military Industrial Complex with its unlimited, unaccountable and unchallenged
budget. The voting public has no real voice in anything of consequence and can
effect no significant change. American military and cultural imperialism is
changing the face of the earth, usually for the worse. Its health care system
is both the most expensive and the least effective in the developed countries
of the world. People have grown
frustrated and angry about these shortcomings, but they appear unable to
articulate their complaints or find a way to fix them. Belief in democracy has
become as rare as belief in God has in Italy.
In 1882 Friedrich
Nietzsche proclaimed that God is Dead. That was sad, since God was the most
noble concept that mankind has come up with.
There have been other noble concepts: truth, beauty, justice, and in
that list was democracy. Now democracy is dead!
Some of those others are on life support. What’s left to be believed in? Well, we have pride, right off the top of
Dante’s list of Seven Deadly Sins, and currently the most trendy of them. There’s even a National Pride Month. Next on his list was either lust or greed, so
will we be having a Lust Month or a Greed Month? Given the dropping birth rates, sperm counts
and growing gender confusion, maybe a Lust Month could be useful, but since we
are promoting our most rampant sins, why not follow up with a Greed Month?
Italy has long been addicted to style, “la moda”. Unfortunately, in its insatiable quest to be
at the forefront of what’s “In”, it has imitated every bad idea exported by the
United States, among them drug addiction, slob culture, single motherhood, chemical
castration, gratuitous profanity, obesity, self-mutilation, and a forced
obsession with diversity, as well as privatization and dismemberment of public resources.
It even emulates American efforts to suppress free speech, usually through groups formed to protect us from disinformation, and spy on its people with the help and guidance of large corporations. This entails total submission to the theories and tactics of US Neo-cons
and Neo-libs. Will the country find a spine?
There’s not much to put one’s hopes on, although Italy does still have a
number of good independent minded journalists, but they are seldom seen or
heard in the mainstream media, just like in the USA.
I started this essay by stating how fortunate I have been. I
have a wonderful wife and family and live in what I consider the most beautiful
place in the world, and while I have enjoyed good health for most of my life,
my doctors tell me that that is no longer true.
Again, my good luck puts me in the country with the best health care
system I know of. We all must face our
mortality at some time. Just in case I haven’t, I am frequently asked the year
of my birth. Following my answer I often
hear a cheerful “complimenti”, as if they
are surprised that I’m still alive and walking on my own. I take it as a compliment but it does lead to
thinking about the end getting closer. That
facing of reality is eased by the sense of continuity that comes with starting
as a child and moving through the stages of marriage, parenthood and then seeing
grandchildren start the same cycle. Well
into the fourth quarter on my game clock, I can’t help thinking of all the
people whose lives were interrupted by the wars and political crimes of the
earlier attempts at world domination. They died without knowing if, how, or when the
calamity would end. By now, whether I
die of natural causes or am taken away with everyone else in a nuclear holocaust, it won’t change the story of my life very much.
I thank God for what I’ve had. I
also thank my parents for giving me life and I thank all those who built the
world in which I’ve lived. They are all
dead too. If my allotment of good fortune hasn't been exhausted by now, I hope to live long enough to see signs that the planet will survive
and that the two countries that I’ve spent my life in will somehow rise from
the depths of nihilism they’ve fallen into.
***
Saturday, June 24, 2023
The Biggest Leak
Earlier this month (June 2023) the most important story in the history of humankind leaked out. A self-proclaimed whistle-blower named David Grusch held a press conference to report that the Pentagon had a special secret department to investigate UFOs and to store the remains of Unknown Flying Objects and their occupants. Grusch reported that while he had worked in the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office of the US Military, he had not personally seen the preserved artifacts but various colleagues had separately reported to him the existence of such materiel.
Mankind has wondered, since we evolved sufficiently to consider such thoughts, if we were alone in the universe or if there were other forms of intelligent life out there somewhere. Finally, after millenniums of speculation, we finally appear to have an answer. It may be top secret but somewhere in a warehouse in a desert the Pentagon has an answer, or some answers.
To their credit, the New York Times reported the press conference, and its most reviled columnist, Ross Douthout, added some commentary about the revelations on June 16th. Douthout is what passes for the office “conservative” at the NYT, writing about issues which raise more questions than answers, in contrast to the other NYT columnists whose role is to dispense the current positions of the establishment on economic policy, foreign policy and gender and identity politics. Although some of them write about more than one of those areas of interest, they have remained notably silent on the story of the millennium, almost as quiet as they’ve been on the attack on the Nord Sea 2 pipelines.
The breaking of the story, and its subsequent disappearance, involved a number of bizarre coincidences. The whistle-blowing press conference was reported on June 6th , almost the same day as the death of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who turned “whistleblower” into a household word. More mysteriously, in contrast to consistent US Government policy to persecute, prosecute, assassinate or incarcerate all whistle-blowers reporting on major government malfeasance, there has been no attempt to persecute or vilify Grusch for his revelations. There have even been testimonials to his reliability and character from numerous government employees.
This is the first year that I can remember there being widespread concern over the dangers of Artificial Intelligence and now we’re hearing that there is evidence of alien creatures and their vehicles but all the evidence is secretly maintained by the Pentagon. The Department of Defense, formerly the War Department, was rechristened with its current name in 1949, just after George Orwell published his most famous book “1984”. Grusch stated that while the particular department he worked in was established in 2022, the military establishment has been collecting UFO information and related artifacts for something like ninety years.
Rep. James Comer, the current Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says that while he doesn’t know much about the subject, there will be hearings. I confess that I don’t recall hearing Rep. Comer’s name before, and I was also unaware of evidence that the House Oversight Committee still existed. We do know that the DOD has never passed an audit and that the first attempt only came in 2017. Despite the talk about polarization, the US Congress is always in near total harmony in authorizing increases to the “Defense” budget.
The silence that this story has generated is unprecedented, including its disappearance in the media. By now we would have expected to hear Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy denouncing the breakdown in the national security institutions and Adam Schiff demanding more transparency but we do understand both the Bloods and the Crips, also known as the Republican and Democratic Party officials, being momentarily perplexed about how to turn this story to their partisan electoral advantage. If Marjory Taylor Greene has been struck speechless, maybe there is a just God after all. We’ve grown accustomed to our political representatives ignoring our basic concerns to speak out on things their advisors tell them will give more tangible electoral results but still, how come we’re not hearing Senator Lindsay Graham screaming into any available microphone “How many aliens have we killed and what did it take to kill them?” “I want more money appropriated for the development of new weapons to kill aliens.” Is the Senator not feeling well? Why this silence?
The biggest story in human history may turn out to be a hoax, as many of us, including most of our journalists, appear to have concluded, but hoax, mind control experiment, or hidden truth, whatever it turns out to be, it remains one of the greatest scandals in the history of the USA.
We have an unlimited military budget which dwarfs those of the rest of the world, allowing us to maintain a military occupation of ¾ of the countries of the world (I believe it is officially referred to in terms such as cooperation or alliances) and the ability to bomb into submission those who are not, or at least to subvert their governments, all in the name of spreading democracy, and yet this same military establishment is keeping secret from us and from our elected representatives, evidence of other forms of life. That’s a curious type of democracy, even if the secrets they’re keeping just turn out to be another expensive hoax.
Sixty-three years ago, when leaving office, President Eisenhower warned against the growth of the Military Industrial Complex. His warning was ignored. While prescient, I doubt that even he could have imagined just how far out of control it could become.
***
Friday, October 21, 2022
Fall Elections
We’ve just had national elections in Italy on 25 September
2022, and now we await the mid-term elections of 2022 in the USA.
The Italian elections were called as soon as the newly
elected Parliamentarians had served enough time in office to be assured of a
Parliamentary pension. That was
foreseeable but the speed with which these snap elections were scheduled was
not. There was little time for
campaigning and little was done. In half
a century I have never seen so little campaign publicity here. Almost no posters or ads anywhere. The current Italian organization of elections
is virtually indecipherable, certainly to foreigners, but my impression is that
few Italians have much of a clue as to how the system works either. One mostly just votes for a party, but there
are also preferences and politicians seem to be able to represent whatever city
or region their party agrees to let them run in, with residency having nothing
to do with it.
There are a large number of political parties but they tend
to band together as parties of the center-right or the center-left. Italy has suffered a great deal from the
Covid pandemic and now, just when people have expected a recovery, the war in
Ukraine has come along to devastate the economy even more than Covid. The Draghi Government was something akin to a
unity government, i.e. a government of unelected “technocrats” appointed to see
the country through the Covid crisis.
Virtually all the major parties supported that government, with the
exception of Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. While in the past this essentially right-wing
party trailed behind the other two parties in the center-right alliance, the
Lega, headed by Matteo Salvini and Forza Italia, headed by Silvio Berlusconi,
this time she outpolled them with 26% compared to 8% for the Lega and 8% for
Forza Italia, with their combined center-right taking something like 44% of the
vote. She may not have been a part of
the Draghi Government but she did support its unconditional allegiance to NATO
and the US, just like all the other parties.
The big losers were the Partito Democratico and its partners
in the center-left coalition. Its
partners mostly consist of vanity parties, i.e. splinter parties formed by
former leaders of the PD who thought they were better than the current
leadership. The center-left wound up
with 26% of the vote.
That left the Five Star Movement, which only a couple of
election cycles back came out of nowhere to become the party with the highest
number of elected parliamentarians, as the only other significant element. While the 5SM officially supported the Draghi
Government, it split over the continued supply of weapons to Ukraine, with
several of its members, who were ministers in the government, forming their own
party, in a show of support for Draghi and the US government. When riding high, the 5SM had accomplished
two significant goals. It passed legislation
to cut Italy’s oversized Parliament by 40%, a change which goes into effect
following the recent elections. It also passed the Reddito di Citidinanza, a
measure by which people with limited means who apply, receive an income of
€500./month. The party was expected to
do very badly in the recent elections, at least in part because of the anger
generated in the north among people who work hard and still struggle to make a
living. However, the 5SM did remarkably
well in the South where many people have benefitted from the boost to their typically
low income. The party polled 15% with
the remaining 15% split between a center coalition and the other small parties.
There was some discussion on why there had not been faster
action to make Italy independent in terms of energy and why renewable energy
had not been a high priority of the government but the fact that the US
sanctions, acquiesced to by the EU, had cut the available supply of energy
practically over night by 40%, was rarely mentioned except by a few
non-establishment journalists and a several renegade politicians. Thus, the Italian public, which apparently
opposed sending more weapons to Ukraine by something like 44 to 38%, had no
political party representing their views on one of the most pressing issues of
the day.
Italians usually have a large turnout in national elections. This year was an exception with a 64%
turnout, down from 73% in 2018 and 80% in 2008.
Non-voters outnumbered both the winning center-right coalition and the
defeated center-left coalition. There
has been more noise about the election after it than there was before it took
place. Conventional establishment
leftists are pulling their hair out because the country has been taken over by
a party whose origins derive from the remnants of Mussolini supporters, while
nobody cares to point out that originally of the Partito Democratico was the
Partito Comunista Italiano, which supported Stalin and toasted the crushing of
Hungary, long after the death of Mussolini.
Can people change and do they change? Much evidence suggests that they
can. The PD became the most extreme
right party in Italy, at least with regard to economic issues, when Matteo
Renzi attempted to push through a new Italian Constitution drawn up by JP
Morgan with the paid consultancy of Tony Blair, in an effort to reduce the
input of the Italian public on policy decisions.
The recent elections took place on September 25th. While the PD had become the most vociferous
supporter of Ukraine and NATO prior to the elections, by October 6th
or 7th the newly resigned PD Secretary was calling for demonstrations
demanding negotiations leading to peace, as people were already in the streets
burning their electric bills and to refusing to pay what in essence were well
beyond their ability to pay.
Unfortunately, ex-Secretary Letta called for the demonstrations to be
outside the Russian Embassy, rather than at the US Embassy, a rather hollow
gesture inasmuch as the Russians had been clamoring for negotiations for nearly
a decade to halt the NATO expansion on their borders. Indeed, there had been negotiations leading
to the Minsk accords, ignored by signees France and Germany and violated by
Ukraine. Apparently, there were also
negotiations to end the war shortly after the invasion, supported by Zelenskyy,
but vetoed by Uncle Sam and the more militant elements within the Ukrainian
regime.
The new government will not take office until early
November, despite all the criticism it has received before even being
officially appointed. The country is
showing signs of turmoil which are likely to grow. The Italian economy may grind to a halt as
retail and industrial businesses are forced to close but it will not be
alone. Much of the EU is likely to face
something reminiscent of the Great Depression.
Misery loves company. There
should be enough to go around.
The 2022 US Mid-term Elections-
It is not uncommon in the US to describe up-coming elections
as the most important in a lifetime.
Presidential elections of 2000, 2016 and 2020 had something of that
aura. They had the potential to alter
the course of history, of conditions in the US and around the world, and they
did. Mid-term elections seldom have that
importance. This year they do. The BLOODS and the CRIPS, as I choose to
refer to the Republican and Democratic Parties, both deserve to lose, one for
sedition, the other for failing to effectively deal with it. While both parties appear to be functioning
below a level of competency one would expect by picking government
representatives at random out of a large phone book, there is a major
difference. One party has effectively abandoned the concept of government
elected by the voters. It is a minority
party, a difficulty it has dealt with effectively for decades by using many of
the built-in peculiarities of the US Constitution to hold onto power despite rarely
having majority votes. Under the last
president, the BLOODS have renounced all respect for the rule of law and any
pretence of civility or decency, to pursue the quest for unlimited perpetual
power, whether it be for personal gain or to inflict their will on the majority
of their countrymen. This is a clear
attempt to seat a totalitarian regime.
If they prevail in the upcoming election by margins large enough for
them to gain full control of the voting process, the USA, which we prefer to
think of as an historic leader of the democratic experiment, is dead! Unless the current war escalates into a
nuclear holocaust, the physical terrain will still be there, inhabited by more
than 300 million people, as will be rulers of the country, but the USA will be
as extinct as the Roman Republic or the Soviet Union.
There should be two other major issues in the coming
elections, starting with climate change making the world uninhabitable, and the
threat of a nuclear holocaust doing the same thing more quickly. However, it would seem, judging from the news
as presented by the MSM, that the deciding issues are more likely to be the price
of gasoline and the status of abortion rights. The CRIPS, who only a few months
ago were in a funk over their prospects of being blown out in the mid-terms,
have grown more optimistic since the striking down of Roe vs. Wade by the newly
radical right-wing Supreme Court, which has created a sizable backlash. CRIPS have also been encouraged by the
reduction of gasoline prices, by full employment, and by the soaring stock
market. Unfortunately, the stock market
has sagged lately, gas prices have turned up again and inflation has grown fast
enough to make people edgy. A poll taken
in Georgia the other day said that abortion rights are a decisive issue for
11.7% of voters polled, “threats to democracy” are the central issue for 18%,
while “the economy” is the decisive factor for 40%. In a few weeks the continued existence of the
world’s most powerful democracy may be decided by fluctuations in gasoline
prices.
For any of you with the opportunity to vote in the upcoming
US elections, I urge you to vote for the CRIPS, no matter how obnoxious you may
find their candidate on your ballot. I
have faced a similar challenge. The CRIP
candidate on my ballot is the son of one of my Senators, who is a Batista
Cuban, among other issues. I am unaware
of any Batista Cuban who has ever voted against funding any CIA-installed
Fascist government anywhere in the world, or for that matter opposing any
military expenditure at all, whether they are BLOODS or CRIPS, or whether they
represent FL, TX or NJ. I have no
anti-Cuban prejudice. I simply don’t want to vote for anyone with that kind of
mind-set. I have done it though, and you
should too. There are many issues to be
fought over and some may be very important to you. Speak out about them. But right now, nothing is more important than
assuring that there will be real elections in the future.
Saturday, September 3, 2022
What's the Next -ISM to be Called?
The legacies of the two opposing factions, the communists and the fascists, lie in the tendency of people who have lived under one of those systems to embrace the other. Thus, the people of much of Eastern Europe, from Poland to Hungary, who suffered for many years under communist regimes, seem relatively amenable to governments with authoritarian, i.e. fascist tendencies. In Italy, birthplace of fascism, the Communist Party became the country’s largest political party after the regime was ousted. It is still one of the largest despite changing its name to the Democratic Party (Partito Democratico). The term “Nazism” has been banished from all polite discourse everywhere, other than a few outposts in Ukraine and Hells Angels reunions in South Dakota. Germany has made a major effort to make amends for its history as the birthplace of Nazism and to assure that those roots never again sprout on its soil. It has also remained productively and reassuringly demilitarized for nearly eighty years, other than for its on-going military occupation by the US. That peaceful era appears to be coming to an end.
Gang Turf |