Wednesday Roundup: Continuing Mostly On War

The other day I tried to articulate the connection between the domestic war—the war of liberal western governments on their subject populations—and the aggressively warlike foreign policy of the same governments, led by the US Neocons. It seems like a good idea to continue from that point today.

Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat, takes a break from mostly foreign policy in his latest offering to focus on the the UK’s domestic war. Of course, that war in the UK has significant similarities to the wars raging in the US and elsewhere in the collective West. Crooke begins, naturally enough, with the Covid Regime. The Telegraph has released a huge amount of internal government messaging that reveals the cynical nature of the entire exercise. No surprise there. I mean, we all knew that these people weren’t so stupid that they really believed what they were saying:

Betting All On Hegemony; Risking All, To Stave Off Ruin

Note that word hegemony. We’re used to its use in the context of geopolitics, but here Crooke, the former diplomat, is applying it to the war of government against its subjects:

Just occasionally, a window is opened onto the truth of how the ‘system’ works. Momentarily, it stands naked in its degeneracy. We avert our eyes, yet, it is a revelation (though it shouldn’t be). For, we see clearly how tawdry has been the attire which clothed it. ‘Liberalism’s’ seeming success – almost wholly an ephemeral PR production – serves only to make its underlying internal contradictions more obvious; more ‘in your face’ – much less credible.

This unravelling speaks to a failure to satisfactorily resolve liberal modernity’s inherent contradictions. Or, rather its unravelling derives from the choice to resolve a waning legitimacy, through an ever more totalistic and ideological reaching for hegemony.

One such window has been the sordid affair of the UK pandemic lockdowns – as revealed by a paper trail leak of 100,000 ministerial WhatsApp messages, managing the lockdown project.

He offers quotes from commentators, and this one from Janet Daley is particularly trenchant:

“It [lockdown] wasn’t about science, it was about politics. That was obvious as soon as the government began talking about following The Science – as if it were a fixed body of revealed truth … they were engaged in a deliberately misleading campaign of public coercion. The programme was designed to frighten – not inform – and to make doubt or scepticism appear morally irresponsible – which is precisely the opposite of what science does”.

But then Crooke moves to the theoretical level, working from the views of, ahem, the controversial German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt:

Carl Schmitt (/ʃmɪt/; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism. Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Derrida, Waldemar Gurian, Carlo Galli, Jaime Guzmán, Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Hayek, Reinhart Koselleck, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Leo Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

I was pleased to see that Crooke used the same word I did to describe Western politics: Manichaean.

The surveillance-based liberal managerial state has, as Arta Moeini has written, ballooned into “a totalistic and aspiring globe-spanning Leviathan”, fraudulently disguised in the feel-good casing of liberal democracy …

... The state may at any time suspend the rule of law for what it deems the greater good. The pandemic merely exposed the workings in extremis of liberal democracy – channelling Carl Schmitt’s notion of a “state of exception” being the source-code to state ‘sovereignty’ over the populace.

In this ethical vacuum, and with the capsize of societal meaning, ... To be blunt, in its lack of any deeper guiding principle, it is purely sociopathic.

This lack of meaning is actually rooted in liberalism’s philosophical roots. Liberalism originally presented its rejection of meaning as a liberation from the Wars of Religion in Europe that would be rooted in individual autonomy. We have seen that movement morph into a demand for universal conformity and war on a global scale in the name of individual liberation (note the LGBYQwerty flags that US embassies sport).

Liberalism was conceived during the early French Revolution as a project of systemic liberation from oppressive social hierarchies, religion and cultural norms of the past, so that a new order of liberated individualism could come into being. Rousseau saw it as a radical clean break from the past – a disembedding of the individual from family, church and cultural norms, so that he or she could better evolve as a unitary component to a redeemed universal governance.

Who can fail to recognize this as the dominant “philosophy” of the West? But such an ideology must be based precisely on a lack of meaning in human existence—even a rejection of the very notion of a “human nature.”

This was the meaning to liberalism in its early phase. However, the subsequent Reign of Terror and mass executions under the Jacobins signaled the schizophrenic connection between ‘liberation’ and the desire to force compliance on society. The persistent appeal of violent revolution versus imposed (Utopian) ‘redemption of humanity marks the two oppositional poles to the western psyche which today is being ‘resolved’ through the tilt to ‘hegemony’.

This inherent tension between the radical liberation of the individual and a conformist ‘world order’ was to be resolved via ‘new universal values’: Diversity, gender and equity – plus restitution awarded to the victims for earlier discrimination suffered. ...

The contradiction inherent to this was too evident: The Rest of World sees the ‘liberal’ order as an-all-too obvious device to prolong western power. ...

Crooke then delves into Schmitt’s theorizing on how to keep power, including the oft remarked need for a boogeyman—domestic as well as foreign. It could be a virus or, preferably, a person. And this lies at the heart of the West’s refusal—even inability—to negotiate:

...

Carl Schmitt’s other two mantras were firstly, to keep power: ‘Use it’ (or lose it); and secondly, configure an ‘enemy’ as polarising and as ‘dark’ as possible in order to keep power – and to keep the masses fearful and compliant.

Hence, we have seen Biden – lacking an alternative – resorting to radical Manichaeism to bolster Authority against his domestic opponents in the U.S. (ironically casting them as enemies of ‘democracy’), whilst using the Ukraine war as the tool by which to cast the West’s war on Russia too, as an epic struggle between the Light and Dark. These Manichean ideological source-codes for now, dominate western liberalism.

But the West has put itself into a trap: ‘Going Manichean’ puts the West into an ideological straight-jacket. It is a crisis of the West’s own making. Put bluntly, Manichaeism is the antithesis to any negotiated solution, or off-ramp. Carl Schmitt was clear on this point: the intent of conjuring up the blackest of enmities, precisely was to preclude (liberal) negotiation: How could ‘virtue’ strike a bargain with ‘evil’?

For a good example of the Zhou regime’s cynical resort to radical Manicaeism to bolster an ephemeral sort of Authority, look no further than Pelosi’s military occupation of the Imperial City on the Potomac and the subsequent J6 show trials—both in Congress and in the shamefully compliant courts.

That inability to negotiate coupled with the Manichaean mission to remake the world in its own image, leads the globalists to resort to constant provocations in the most inappropriate ways—simulated nuclear attacks on St. Petersburg, and so forth. Yesterday Russia reacted by taking down a US drone, but the statement by the Russian ambassador in DC was a strong suggestion that this was just the beginning:

dana

@dana916

U.S. drones collect data that Kiev uses to strike Russia, Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov said.

"We are concerned about the unacceptable activities of the US military in the immediate vicinity of our borders. We are well aware of the purpose for which such unmanned reconnaissance and strike vehicles are used ," the diplomat notes in a commentary due to the fact that an American MQ-9 drone crashed in the water area Black Sea. As Antonov recalled, John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications at the White House National Security Council, said that American devices make such flights on a daily basis. "What are they doing thousands of kilometers from the United States? The answer is obvious: they are collecting intelligence information, which is subsequently used by the Kiev regime to strike at our armed forces and territory," the ambassador said.

"We presume that the United States will refrain from further speculation in the media space and will stop flying near Russian borders ," he added.

Note the references to the “vicinity of our borders” and flying “near our borders”. Not “crossing into our territory.” Because the purpose of those flights really is as obvious as the ambassador says it is: they are a direct participation of the US in the hostilities, in the sense that a sine qua non is a direct participation.

Larry Johnson picked up on that immediately:

Don’t be confused. The alleged “collision” between a Russian SU-27 jet fighter and a U.S. Air Force MQ9 Reaper drone was not an accident. Russia was sending an unmistakable message to Washington and its NATO allies — Russian patience with NATO arming and prolonging the war in Ukraine is waning and Russia is prepared to act against targets that enable attacks on Russian forces in Ukraine.

In the meantime, on the ground:

Theti Mapping @ThetiMapping

I expect RU will avoid frontal assaults on Chasiv Yar and go straight for the E40 towards Kramatorsk. This will give them partial control of the ridge, a bridge across the canal, and positions for field artillery to fire on Kramatorsk, Slavyansk, Rai-Oleksandrivka, etc.

War Monitor @WarMonitors

⚡️What’s after Bakhmut? In my opinion, Wagner/Russia is trying to secure the ridge that runs from Chasiv Yar to Lyman in order to attempt offensive manoeuvres from the high ground against large cities such as Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. https://t.co/UNTXwPZ5DZ

For non-Cyrillic readers, Chasiv Yar is the caption inside the red ellipse, and Bakhmut is immediately to the right, but outside the red.

I’ll finish with a reference to a post at TGP that begins with a lengthy excerpt from a Robert Kennedy, Jr., interview on Jimmy Dore. This is the type of stuff that few Americans pay attention to and NO public figures in America touch with a ten foot pole—but the rest of the world knows it. As usual, this is a brief excerpt from a densely informative post:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Fauci Has Been in Charge of Developing Bioweapons for Pentagon Since 2002 (VIDEO)

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined talk show host Jimmy Dore recently to discuss the US involvement with bioweapons programs, Dr. Fauci’s funding of coronavirus gain-of-function research and the Anthrax scare in 2001.

TGP’s Anthony Scott reported earlier on the Amerithrax attacks and the alleged CIA involvement in the bioweapons attack.   Robert Kennedy, Jr. insists the CIA was involved in the attack.

Robert Kennedy then spoke about the bioweapons accident in the US in 2014 that resulted in a federal ban on gain-of-function research in the United States.

Robert Kennedy, J.: “They took the money that Cheney gave them [from the Patriot Act], $2.2 billion, and they funneled it through NIH, and it all went through Anthony Fauci. So beginning in 2002, Anthony Fauci got a 68% raise from the Pentagon for doing bioweapons development, and he got a raise of billions of dollars a year, and then he started doing all of this gain-of-function.

In 2014, three of those bugs escaped in high-profile escapes from different labs in the US. Congress held hearings on it. Everybody was angry, and 300 top scientists sent letters to Obama saying you got to shut down Fauci because he is going to create a pandemic.

So, Obama ordered a moratorium, and at that time, Fauci had eighteen different gain-of-function experiments he was doing around the US. He instead moved his stuff offshore to Wuhan, where he could do it out of sight of these 300 scientists and nosy White House officials who were trying to shut him down.

And he continued to do it with the same people he was funding here, Ralph Baric and Peter Dazak, and they moved their operation to the Wuhan lab.”

.@RobertKennedyJr tells @jimmy_dore that Dr. Anthony Fauci has been in charge of developing bioweapons for the Pentagon since 2002, and in 2014, three viruses escaped from US labs, so he moved his bioweapons research to the Wuhan lab:

“They took the money that Cheney gave them… https://t.co/mNEK8xCYYE pic.twitter.com/8pZPr1Vusl

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 14, 2023

So now China is the new Manichaean boogeyman, based on US misdeeds.