A remarkable interview by Glenn Diesen, with Doug Macgregor. It’s always remarkable when a person in Macgregor’s position speaks the truth. Here are transcript highlights. They’re a bit rough. I’ve done the punctuation, but not caps: Diesen frames the basic question:
Here's an interesting take on this Hamas/Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What if it's about none of that? Here's an interesting view:
"It isn’t about anti-Semitism. It isn’t about Muslims. It isn’t about the reviling slurs coming from the mouths of ‘supposed’ Christians. It isn’t even about Hamas. It is about money. Follow The Money. The Rothschild Cabal envisioned two projects for Israel" [snip]
"The two projects are: 1. The Ben Gurion Canal, and 2. A high speed rail system from tel Aviv to the shores of Gaza. The obstacle was the Palestinians in Gaza. Bring on the bombs and bulldozers! Flatten Gaza in preparation for the Projects!"
"Hamas is not just a group of fighters ... it's an idea. killing an idea is much more difficult than killing people." Excellent observation. The IDF can exterminate HAMAS, but the sons of those killed by them in Gaza will be back for the next instalment.
The Gaza sounds like a 'classic' Kobayashi Maru situation for the Israelis. They are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
Meanwhile, the palestinians have success when they butcher Israelis in a dawn raid, and even greater success when the diaspora and the emotionally-aligned decry the destruction and lives lost.
(BTW, how many babies were aborted in America last year? --but, I digress.)
Not mentioned by MacGregor, and I cannot recall where I heard or read this information yesterday, purportedly the USMC is being offered up as peacekeepers in Gaza (by blinken?, etal) !
Perhaps related, the Commander of MarForCent, Major General McPhillips, USMC cancelled the MarCent Marine Corps Birthday Ball in a note on 31 Oct 23 citing "unforseen operational commitments."
I've never heard of such a thing--the cancellation of the MARINE BIRTHDAY bash--and Marines I know are dumbfounded by the Major General's announcement.
The neocons are heading for another massive geopolitical defeat. Whatever happens militarily, they have lost the PR war. As stated above, they are now inextricably linked with what Israel does in Gaza. Interesting comment too about Solzhenitsyn. He was one of the first to see where the West was heading. When he turned up at Harvard (IIRC) commencement speech in 1978, the smug, bow-tied conservative audience was expecting lots of plaudits for Western superiority over communism. Instead they got some serious home truths about the state of our occidental civilisation. Where are the great thinkers like him today? Mostly banished from public life on Substack and Rumble.
An absolutely masterful speech. My favorite teacher of all time--a humble, deeply-spiritual Catholic priest who also happened to have a doctorate in Russian Studies from Columbia and post-doc work at Moscow State--dedicated a week or two to discussion of the themes Solzhenitsyn raised. Not sure whether it was in Russian or Religion class, but, to a high-school kid during peak Reagan, it was a real eye-opener, to say the least. Just pulled the passage that I think best sums up the path to where we are today:
"But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening."
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during his speech. Solzhenitsyn is a reason why we should never despair when faced with tyranny: the power of one man saying no.
Yes, MacGregor understands China better than Mearsheimer. The latter, like Francis Fukuyama, is ethnocentric and tends to judge east Asia as if the cultures there were similar to those of Europe and North America. Hopefully MacGregor's friend Jeffrey Sachs will enlighten him in the near future. MacGregor is right about China not being an historically belligerent nation. Of course it has had many armies and battles, but the military never played a leading role in Confucian culture. Campaigns were often mounted to protect China from invasions from the northwest, but China preferred to build its Great Wall rather than to expand its realm into central Asia. The only invasions of neighbors were done by the Mongols, who, after conquering much of China and Korea, tried but failed to conquer Japan. And in the twentieth century, China's main wars were a civil war and a war against Japanese invaders.
Traditionally Korea, for the most part, also had Confucian governments. Only in Japan did the warrior (samurai) class gain ruling class status in the medieval period. After the end of WW2, the last remnants of the samurai class were discredited, and Japan gained a "peace constitution" that outlaws war-making and offensive armed forces, although the US has unwisely been urging Japan to constantly spend more money on its Self Defense Forces and even to ignore its peace constitution. The Biden (mis)administration has unfortunately been putting strong pressure on Japan and S. Korea to join its deranged anti-China crusade that goes against the economic interests of both countries as well as the interests of the US. The political elites in both countries, like the elite in Germany, seek to please the US, since the US has many military bases in both Japan and S. Korea, but the majority of people in both countries strongly oppose war with China, and China is the number one trading partner of each country, so it is unlikely that either would attack China if the US attacked China over Taiwan. China, S. Korea, and Japan even today have governments influenced by Confucian values, so it is doubtful that the delusional Biden could completely split these three countries apart, and China has no interest in invading S. Korea or Japan -- or SE Asia or India. And, luckily, China is so strong that any resurgence of the samurai class in Japan is out of the question. And China clearly has no plans to invade Taiwan unless the US tries to intervene militarily, since China is very confident that Taiwan will gladly return to China as China becomes an ever more attractive nation to belong to.
In short, east Asia is not the site of hegemonic sparring and jockeying for power. Mearsheimer simply doesn't understand 1) China, 2) the Confucian ethos of dialog, logic, mutual respect, and enlightened rule, or 3) the respect for family, education, and tradition that is found throughout east Asia and that probably accounts for much of the amazing economic growth taking place there. When China says that trade and foreign policy are not zero sum games, they mean it, since daily life and polity in east Asia as a whole are traditionally not regarded as zero sum games. The Sinophobia displayed by both Trump and Biden is based on gross ignorance and arrogance and is counterproductive. There is no reason economic rivals need to be seen as military threats or enemies unless one is searching for foreign bogeymen to use for domestic political advantage or for raising false fears in order to increase military budgets.
One observation. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I think its a little too simplistic to call Trump Sinophobic. Trump's shtick is multi-dimensional and it is strongly nationalistic. He says (has said) a lot of things which suggest bias and/or racism, but may well have a different motivation. In any event, he's a complex 'situation'.
Dao, do you feel Confucian values still remain in China after Mao's attempts to essentially erase tradition, religion, and history from it's culture? I concede that my knowledge is rough, but Taiwan seems the more apt descendant of those traditional values.
Col MacGregor has been a voice of logic and reason in the midst of the Ukraine madness and now middle east issues. Amongst his many key observations, the lack of a strategy is the most dangerous.
I don't think there is a lack of a strategy. There is certainly a lack of an open and robust discussion of their strategy.
But their strategy is clear, at least to me: They intend to use propaganda, color revolutions, military action, foreign aid, and regime change wherever possible to suppress and defeat rising and/or competitive powers in order to retain as much global domination as possible for as long as possible, even in the face of rising opposition.
Lloyd Austin said as much when he defended the proxy war in Ukraine 18 months ago. Biden essentially repeated it. In Russia, the goal is to bring Putin down (kill him if necessary), install a new government and seize control of Russia's enormous wealth in natural resources. So we will fight until the 'last Ukrainian'. Rinse and repeat everywhere else: especially North Korea, Iran, Taiwan, Niger, Syria and the other 100 or so countries where we have military bases, CIA operatives, and USAID funding. For as long as it takes and as long as our printing press holds up and the Uniparty can 'win' elections. Control of the Middle East is a huge part of the strategy, not because we need their oil (we don't, we can easily become energy self-sufficient), but because we need to control the global energy supply to maintain our hegemony.
Sure, we may not have a plan to get out of the tar baby that is Ukraine. Other than the 'Afghanistan Plan'. But that doesn't mean for a second that we don't have a 'strategy'.
Mike: Seems to me that a lack of strategy has been the MO of these clowns from the get go. I don’t remember being dazzled by any brilliant displays of strategy during the Ukraine fiasco. Or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or our relationship with China. Or our approach to the ME. Or ………..
What if the strategy is to destroy the post WW2 order and diminish the United States? The end point of the global war they are stirring up (what few allies do we have left?) but not preparing for is great damage to us. Open border, inflation, etc. It seems like The Weight of the Poor applied to all aspects of policy. Don’t just bankrupt us with a tsunami of welfare recipients. Obliterate us with global war, domestic anarchy, and financial ruin. It sounds to me like a crazy conspiracy theory. But how to explain so many things going wrong at the same time. It is really ‘Orange Man Bad’ so do the opposite of everything that he did? Or is it that Trump’s policies are designed to improve things for the USA and its people and their policies are designed to tear us down? This is what the ideology says.
Good points...rather than no strategy, maybe the strategy is to do everything possible to screw things up for US. If that’s the case, Zhou is the perfect potus. Scary.
further if you talk to anyone in Russia who is familiar with the situation knows the Russian Armed Forces, they will tell you that the Russians would like nothing better than to send some of our ships to the bottom in the Mediterranean. just imagine you're a Russian and you look at what we have tried to do to them in Ukraine, you listen to the stupid utterly incautious statements made by people like Biden and Blinken and a host of other people, Sullivan, fools in the Senate saying well the Ukrainians are killing Russians--the more they kill the better. What kind of a remark is that? you know since when do we hate Russians? it's absurd. the Russians have not forgotten those things and if the opportunity presents itself to do serious damage to us they'll take it.
Mittens Romney said something like this and it sounded like an accountant looking at a balance sheet. Basically we are getting a good deal because we are spending a relatively small amount of money and our people are not dying. And Russians are getting killed! Such a deal per Pierre Delecto! What a bunch of morally incompetent fools. Per Orwell from ‘Inside the Whale’ they are playing with fire and do not understand that it is hot. If this goes horribly wrong they are going to get us all killed. If it goes slightly less than totally wrong then vast numbers of people (billions?) who are dependent on the modern economy for fuel and fertilizer and therefore food could perish. It really does seem like MacGregor is saying that people are not thinking. How insulated from reality are we? Great post and commentary that would otherwise be hard to even know about. But necessary so that perhaps a few of us are not sleepwalking into the giant global cauldron that Putin is arranging.
Those who will not be in harm's way and have no sons in the conflict can afford a callous indifference to the lives of others. Ukrainians paid for our folly. But Romney prattles on about Trump's deficiencies, unaware of his own hubris.
It's a matter of principle for me not to use Windoze. Youtube does have a feature that allows you to see a transcript. However, it does require significant cleanup. The caps are random and there's no punctuation or paragraph divisions, and the spelling can be rather hit or miss. It remains a lot of work.
No biggie, L. Those babies aren't our babies and would probably have grown up to be terrorists anyway. Oh, and it fulfills all those biblical prophecies.
Here's an interesting take on this Hamas/Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What if it's about none of that? Here's an interesting view:
"It isn’t about anti-Semitism. It isn’t about Muslims. It isn’t about the reviling slurs coming from the mouths of ‘supposed’ Christians. It isn’t even about Hamas. It is about money. Follow The Money. The Rothschild Cabal envisioned two projects for Israel" [snip]
"The two projects are: 1. The Ben Gurion Canal, and 2. A high speed rail system from tel Aviv to the shores of Gaza. The obstacle was the Palestinians in Gaza. Bring on the bombs and bulldozers! Flatten Gaza in preparation for the Projects!"
RTWT: https://helenaglass.net/2023/11/01/israeli-war-facilitating-twoo-israeli-projects/
"Hamas is not just a group of fighters ... it's an idea. killing an idea is much more difficult than killing people." Excellent observation. The IDF can exterminate HAMAS, but the sons of those killed by them in Gaza will be back for the next instalment.
The Gaza sounds like a 'classic' Kobayashi Maru situation for the Israelis. They are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
Meanwhile, the palestinians have success when they butcher Israelis in a dawn raid, and even greater success when the diaspora and the emotionally-aligned decry the destruction and lives lost.
(BTW, how many babies were aborted in America last year? --but, I digress.)
Not mentioned by MacGregor, and I cannot recall where I heard or read this information yesterday, purportedly the USMC is being offered up as peacekeepers in Gaza (by blinken?, etal) !
Perhaps related, the Commander of MarForCent, Major General McPhillips, USMC cancelled the MarCent Marine Corps Birthday Ball in a note on 31 Oct 23 citing "unforseen operational commitments."
I've never heard of such a thing--the cancellation of the MARINE BIRTHDAY bash--and Marines I know are dumbfounded by the Major General's announcement.
(248th)
That would have taken something called diplomacy.
Ooh, Castelletto, sarcasm of the most delicious kind! Don't send the Marines in harms way send the Rainbow brigade!
The neocons are heading for another massive geopolitical defeat. Whatever happens militarily, they have lost the PR war. As stated above, they are now inextricably linked with what Israel does in Gaza. Interesting comment too about Solzhenitsyn. He was one of the first to see where the West was heading. When he turned up at Harvard (IIRC) commencement speech in 1978, the smug, bow-tied conservative audience was expecting lots of plaudits for Western superiority over communism. Instead they got some serious home truths about the state of our occidental civilisation. Where are the great thinkers like him today? Mostly banished from public life on Substack and Rumble.
An absolutely masterful speech. My favorite teacher of all time--a humble, deeply-spiritual Catholic priest who also happened to have a doctorate in Russian Studies from Columbia and post-doc work at Moscow State--dedicated a week or two to discussion of the themes Solzhenitsyn raised. Not sure whether it was in Russian or Religion class, but, to a high-school kid during peak Reagan, it was a real eye-opener, to say the least. Just pulled the passage that I think best sums up the path to where we are today:
"But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening."
Spiritual exhaustion, indeed.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during his speech. Solzhenitsyn is a reason why we should never despair when faced with tyranny: the power of one man saying no.
Yes.
But Solzenhitsyn's journey exacted an enormous toll. I would expect we will pay a similar price.
Yes, MacGregor understands China better than Mearsheimer. The latter, like Francis Fukuyama, is ethnocentric and tends to judge east Asia as if the cultures there were similar to those of Europe and North America. Hopefully MacGregor's friend Jeffrey Sachs will enlighten him in the near future. MacGregor is right about China not being an historically belligerent nation. Of course it has had many armies and battles, but the military never played a leading role in Confucian culture. Campaigns were often mounted to protect China from invasions from the northwest, but China preferred to build its Great Wall rather than to expand its realm into central Asia. The only invasions of neighbors were done by the Mongols, who, after conquering much of China and Korea, tried but failed to conquer Japan. And in the twentieth century, China's main wars were a civil war and a war against Japanese invaders.
Traditionally Korea, for the most part, also had Confucian governments. Only in Japan did the warrior (samurai) class gain ruling class status in the medieval period. After the end of WW2, the last remnants of the samurai class were discredited, and Japan gained a "peace constitution" that outlaws war-making and offensive armed forces, although the US has unwisely been urging Japan to constantly spend more money on its Self Defense Forces and even to ignore its peace constitution. The Biden (mis)administration has unfortunately been putting strong pressure on Japan and S. Korea to join its deranged anti-China crusade that goes against the economic interests of both countries as well as the interests of the US. The political elites in both countries, like the elite in Germany, seek to please the US, since the US has many military bases in both Japan and S. Korea, but the majority of people in both countries strongly oppose war with China, and China is the number one trading partner of each country, so it is unlikely that either would attack China if the US attacked China over Taiwan. China, S. Korea, and Japan even today have governments influenced by Confucian values, so it is doubtful that the delusional Biden could completely split these three countries apart, and China has no interest in invading S. Korea or Japan -- or SE Asia or India. And, luckily, China is so strong that any resurgence of the samurai class in Japan is out of the question. And China clearly has no plans to invade Taiwan unless the US tries to intervene militarily, since China is very confident that Taiwan will gladly return to China as China becomes an ever more attractive nation to belong to.
In short, east Asia is not the site of hegemonic sparring and jockeying for power. Mearsheimer simply doesn't understand 1) China, 2) the Confucian ethos of dialog, logic, mutual respect, and enlightened rule, or 3) the respect for family, education, and tradition that is found throughout east Asia and that probably accounts for much of the amazing economic growth taking place there. When China says that trade and foreign policy are not zero sum games, they mean it, since daily life and polity in east Asia as a whole are traditionally not regarded as zero sum games. The Sinophobia displayed by both Trump and Biden is based on gross ignorance and arrogance and is counterproductive. There is no reason economic rivals need to be seen as military threats or enemies unless one is searching for foreign bogeymen to use for domestic political advantage or for raising false fears in order to increase military budgets.
Very interesting and instructive. Thank you.
One observation. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I think its a little too simplistic to call Trump Sinophobic. Trump's shtick is multi-dimensional and it is strongly nationalistic. He says (has said) a lot of things which suggest bias and/or racism, but may well have a different motivation. In any event, he's a complex 'situation'.
Dao, do you feel Confucian values still remain in China after Mao's attempts to essentially erase tradition, religion, and history from it's culture? I concede that my knowledge is rough, but Taiwan seems the more apt descendant of those traditional values.
Col MacGregor has been a voice of logic and reason in the midst of the Ukraine madness and now middle east issues. Amongst his many key observations, the lack of a strategy is the most dangerous.
I don't think there is a lack of a strategy. There is certainly a lack of an open and robust discussion of their strategy.
But their strategy is clear, at least to me: They intend to use propaganda, color revolutions, military action, foreign aid, and regime change wherever possible to suppress and defeat rising and/or competitive powers in order to retain as much global domination as possible for as long as possible, even in the face of rising opposition.
Lloyd Austin said as much when he defended the proxy war in Ukraine 18 months ago. Biden essentially repeated it. In Russia, the goal is to bring Putin down (kill him if necessary), install a new government and seize control of Russia's enormous wealth in natural resources. So we will fight until the 'last Ukrainian'. Rinse and repeat everywhere else: especially North Korea, Iran, Taiwan, Niger, Syria and the other 100 or so countries where we have military bases, CIA operatives, and USAID funding. For as long as it takes and as long as our printing press holds up and the Uniparty can 'win' elections. Control of the Middle East is a huge part of the strategy, not because we need their oil (we don't, we can easily become energy self-sufficient), but because we need to control the global energy supply to maintain our hegemony.
Sure, we may not have a plan to get out of the tar baby that is Ukraine. Other than the 'Afghanistan Plan'. But that doesn't mean for a second that we don't have a 'strategy'.
He is a massive does of reason in the face of the emoting that passes as foreign policy today.
Mike: Seems to me that a lack of strategy has been the MO of these clowns from the get go. I don’t remember being dazzled by any brilliant displays of strategy during the Ukraine fiasco. Or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or our relationship with China. Or our approach to the ME. Or ………..
Dangerous with all caps.
Ya, it's like that checkers vs. chess deal. Plain 2D chess, and D.C. still can't see more than one step ahead
What if the strategy is to destroy the post WW2 order and diminish the United States? The end point of the global war they are stirring up (what few allies do we have left?) but not preparing for is great damage to us. Open border, inflation, etc. It seems like The Weight of the Poor applied to all aspects of policy. Don’t just bankrupt us with a tsunami of welfare recipients. Obliterate us with global war, domestic anarchy, and financial ruin. It sounds to me like a crazy conspiracy theory. But how to explain so many things going wrong at the same time. It is really ‘Orange Man Bad’ so do the opposite of everything that he did? Or is it that Trump’s policies are designed to improve things for the USA and its people and their policies are designed to tear us down? This is what the ideology says.
Good points...rather than no strategy, maybe the strategy is to do everything possible to screw things up for US. If that’s the case, Zhou is the perfect potus. Scary.
Yes.
Sorry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgGgI3xDp4c&ab_channel=DouglasMacgregorDaily
further if you talk to anyone in Russia who is familiar with the situation knows the Russian Armed Forces, they will tell you that the Russians would like nothing better than to send some of our ships to the bottom in the Mediterranean. just imagine you're a Russian and you look at what we have tried to do to them in Ukraine, you listen to the stupid utterly incautious statements made by people like Biden and Blinken and a host of other people, Sullivan, fools in the Senate saying well the Ukrainians are killing Russians--the more they kill the better. What kind of a remark is that? you know since when do we hate Russians? it's absurd. the Russians have not forgotten those things and if the opportunity presents itself to do serious damage to us they'll take it.
Mittens Romney said something like this and it sounded like an accountant looking at a balance sheet. Basically we are getting a good deal because we are spending a relatively small amount of money and our people are not dying. And Russians are getting killed! Such a deal per Pierre Delecto! What a bunch of morally incompetent fools. Per Orwell from ‘Inside the Whale’ they are playing with fire and do not understand that it is hot. If this goes horribly wrong they are going to get us all killed. If it goes slightly less than totally wrong then vast numbers of people (billions?) who are dependent on the modern economy for fuel and fertilizer and therefore food could perish. It really does seem like MacGregor is saying that people are not thinking. How insulated from reality are we? Great post and commentary that would otherwise be hard to even know about. But necessary so that perhaps a few of us are not sleepwalking into the giant global cauldron that Putin is arranging.
Those who will not be in harm's way and have no sons in the conflict can afford a callous indifference to the lives of others. Ukrainians paid for our folly. But Romney prattles on about Trump's deficiencies, unaware of his own hubris.
and witless stupidity.
Netanyahu's son is living a great life in Florida. I'm amazed Bibi isn't run out of town on rail just for that fact alone.
He’ll soon have a new neighbor: Zel
Beat me to it, ML! I hope he doesn't have any trouble getting a green card.
If so, he can come in thru Mexico
It's a matter of principle for me not to use Windoze. Youtube does have a feature that allows you to see a transcript. However, it does require significant cleanup. The caps are random and there's no punctuation or paragraph divisions, and the spelling can be rather hit or miss. It remains a lot of work.
Pretty impressive functionality.
No biggie, L. Those babies aren't our babies and would probably have grown up to be terrorists anyway. Oh, and it fulfills all those biblical prophecies.
The two most profound comments, imo. I can't like them tho, because there is nothing to like about hate & slaughter.
What if in this great awakening people said no to that? Instead insist they want their world filled with love & beauty?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=EK5FKfZDUsqy8HQN&v=XqvKDCP5-xE&feature=youtu.be