Defense Secretary Mattis resigns amid Washington backlash over Syria troop withdrawal
By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org
Jim Mattis—Despite theatrics, his gesture is NOT about the nation's security. Unless entirely brainwashed by his own propaganda, he knows neither Russia nor China nor Iran represent existential threats to ordinary Americans, only the interests of the ruling 0.00001%, whom he has served all his life. So his gesture is really about choosing the safer career track with the MIC and the Deep State and its minions. He is betting—maybe wrongly—that Trump will soon be gone.
Dateline: 21 December 2018
The current kerfuffle amid the US ruling class shows more clearly than ever that all parties are morally repugnant.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he announcement by US President Donald Trump of his decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria—followed by reports that he has ordered a partial withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan—has unleashed a major crisis within the administration and its relations with the military.
Thursday’s resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis laid bare these sharpening divisions. In his letter to Trump, Mattis wrote, “Because you have the right to have a secretary of defense whose views are better aligned with yours ... I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
Mattis’s letter laid out an unconcealed criticism of Trump’s policies, declaring the necessity of being “resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests (sic) are increasingly in tension with ours,” i.e., China and Russia.
The resignation of the former Marine Corps general who required a waiver from Congress because of his appointment as defense secretary so soon after his retirement from the military, came just one day after Trump’s announcement of the Syria withdrawal, which Mattis opposed.
Pelosi smugly bloviating about Trump not playing "by the rules", endangering national security, making Putin happy, and so on. Her pathetic position is providing cues for the Democrats' powerful noise machine, and million of clueless liberaloids who understand little or nothing about today's real issues.
In a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday night, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi described herself as “shaken” by the resignation of the ex-general. Appearing with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, she hailed Mattis as a “patriotic American” and a “voice of stability,” adding, “Our troops look to Secretary Mattis as a leader, and he is now leaving.”
Schumer went on to link the resignation of Mattis to the previous departures of Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Gen. John Kelly, his chief of staff, describing them as a loss of the forces of “stability” within the administration.
If this is the kind of “stability” you are looking for, you can’t find anything better than a military dictatorship.
The Democratic congressional leadership’s reaction sums up the nature of the divisions within Washington and the US ruling establishment. The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is driven by US imperialism’s global interests and has nothing to do with the conditions confronting the working class, the overwhelming majority of the US population.
Trump’s announcement of the Syrian troop withdrawal provoked an extraordinary backlash from the leadership of both his own Republican Party and the Democrats, as well as from the major media and state-connected Washington think tanks.
Lindsey Graham—the warmongering jellyfish from South Carolina could be counted on to pull his hair over Trump's move. The military industrial complex could not find a more dedicated servant.
Democratic Senators Bob Menendez and Jack Reed, the ranking members of the Senate’s foreign affairs and armed services committees, respectively, joined with the leading Republican critic of Trump’s withdrawal decision, Senator Lindsey Graham, for a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday, announcing a bipartisan drive to pass a Senate resolution demanding that Trump “reverse course” and ensure that any withdrawal from Syria will be based on “conditions on the ground.”
Major broadcast media outlets have been overwhelmingly critical of the withdrawal decision, bringing on former generals and intelligence figures like ex-CIA director John Brennan to denounce it as a capitulation to Russia, Iran and the Syrian government.
The New York Times published an editorial Thursday invoking the authority of Trump’s national security adviser, the maniacal warmonger and international bully, John Bolton, citing his vow to expand the role of US troops in Syria to confront Iran.
It criticized Trump for having “overruled Mr. Bolton and the rest of his national security team.” His decision, the newspaper of record of what once passed for American liberalism, argued, had “sowed new uncertainty about America’s commitment to the Middle East, its willingness to be a global leader and Mr. Trump’s role as commander in chief. Soldiers have a duty to follow their leader and carry out lawful orders. But success depends on trusting that the leader knows what he’s doing and where he’s going.”
It went on to accuse Trump of harming “morale” and risking “getting American soldiers killed or wounded for objectives their commanders had already abandoned.”
Suggesting that Trump made the announcement to divert public attention from the anti-Russia campaign, the Times concluded, “That would be the worst rationale for a commander in chief sworn to protect the nation and to honor the men and women who serve in uniform.”
Under conditions in which his White House is under mounting political and legal siege connected to the Mueller investigation and the conviction and sentencing of past aides and associates, the timing of the Syria announcement may well have been driven by Trump’s calculation that a troop withdrawal would be viewed favorably by the majority of the US population.
In response to Graham’s heated denunciations of the decision, Trump tweeted, “So hard to believe that Lindsey Graham would be against saving soldier lives & billions of $$$. Why are we fighting for our enemy, Syria, by staying & killing ISIS for them, Russia, Iran & other locals? Time to focus on our Country & bring our youth back home where they belong!”
However cynical Trump’s motives, there is no question that there is immense popular hostility to the never-ending US wars in the Middle East.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hose denouncing the withdrawal announcement do not even attempt to make a case to the population for the continuation of the US intervention, which is illegal both under US and international law. Their entire appeal is pitched to the American ruling establishment and, above all, to the vast US military and intelligence apparatus.
There was a similar appeal to the military in an op-ed by Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius, a dependable mouthpiece for the CIA and the Pentagon, who warned that Trump’s troop withdrawal would create a “vacuum that will be filled by one of a series of bad actors—Iran, Russia, Turkey, Islamic extremists, the Syrian regime—take your pick, they're all dangerous for American interests in the Middle East.”
He argues that the US military presence had “stabilized northeast Syria; it blocked Iranian expansion; it checked Russian hegemony; it gave the US some bargaining leverage for an eventual political settlement in Syria.”
WAPO's Ignatius: Media scum of the most fetid sort. These are the men who stoke the flames of war.
This “bargaining leverage” was based upon the US military’s use of special forces troops and Kurdish militia proxy forces to lay hold of one third of Syria’s national territory, including oil and natural gas fields that are vital to providing the resources for reconstructing a country devastated by more than seven years of a US-orchestrated war for regime-change.
Invoking his visit to US bases in Syria earlier this year, Ignatius writes, “It's hard to describe the competence of American troops in Syria without sounding corny. Suffice it to say that they found a way to project American power with maximum damage to the enemy and minimum cost for America.”
This “maximum damage” can be seen in the rubble of Raqqa, which was largely razed to the ground by US bombs and shells. According to the monitoring group Airwars, nearly 30,000 Syrians have been reported killed as a result of US bombardments, with tens of thousands more maimed.
This slaughter has been justified in the name of a war against ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), which was itself the product of the US war of aggression against Iraq, which claimed roughly a million lives and demolished an entire society. ISIS was further nurtured through the subsequent wars for regime-change in Libya and Syria, where Washington armed and supported the very same Islamist militias that it subsequently claimed to be fighting.
The bitter debate in Washington is driven by rival factions within the ruling class that are equally rapacious and bloodthirsty, determined to prepare for global war to advance the interests of a crisis-ridden American capitalist order against its major rivals, China and Russia, while divided over tactics in terms of how to pursue these aims in the Middle East and elsewhere.
This conflict unfolds in the absence of a mass antiwar movement in the United States and internationally, which is due in large measure to the role played by various pseudo-left organizations, from the New Anti-capitalist Party in France to the International Socialist Organization in the US and the Left Party in Germany. Reflecting privileged layers of the middle class whose social interests are bound up with those of imperialism, all of them have sought to justify the imperialist intervention by the US and its allies in Syria based upon phony claims that CIA-backed Islamist militias are the champions of a democratic “revolution” and by waving the discredited flag of “human rights” imperialism.
There are immense dangers contained in the deepening crisis of the Trump administration and the appeals by the Democrats to the military. At the same time, popular antiwar sentiment is growing and will inevitably take on active forms, joining with the escalation of the class struggle and the rising opposition within the working class to austerity and the destruction of democratic rights.
The political warfare in Washington over US troops in Syria is bound up with an eruption of US and world imperialism that threatens to destroy human civilization. It can be prevented only by the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class to put an end to capitalism.
—Bill Van Auken
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Revolutionary wisdom
Words from an Irish patriot—
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This bunch of fake leftists may feel superior to Khashoggi and his ilk, but they are really not much different in politics or morality. [dropcap]F[/dropcap]ile it under “things we’d like to be true…so we never examine it”: The West’s unstated belief that their politics are exponentially morally superior to those of Saudi Arabia. “We only work with them – we are not at all like them,” is what it boils down to. This article aims to show just how similar “Oriental despotism” is to “Occidental domination” in 2018 by revealing the similarity of Jamal Khashoggi’s socio-political vision to that of Westerners. This is the final part in a 4-part series which aims to pull the sheet off Khashoggi, who is as much as a “reformer” as Hillary Clinton was a “leftist” or Emmanuel Macron was “centrist”. I think it’s necessary because there has been so much talk about Khashoggi, but very little examination of “Khashoggi-Thought” – what he espoused and stood for. Part 1 showed what true “dissidents” in the Muslim World look like and why the elite-defending Khashoggi does not qualify; Part 2 showed how his rabid anti-Iran warmongering and his hysterical anti-Shia sectarianism precluded any possibility of his being even merely a “reformer”; Part 3 demystified and stripped the Islamophobia from “Salafism” to show that many in the West want to “return to a golden era” – like 1776 in America – just as Khashoggi and other Salafists want to return to 676; and also reminded readers that the West and the Muslim World are the only two regions of the world where we still find supporters of monarchy, which is an inherently reactionary and inegalitarian concept in 2018. Khashoggi, just like Western conservatives and centrists, denied any sort of modern leftist political movement – socialism, Islamic socialism, etc. – which could undermine the social powers as apportioned up until the 19th century. Pushing technocratic & elitist bourgeois democracy, anti-socialist economics, window-dressing cultural liberality, and rationalising warmongering is what modern fake-leftism is; because this definition fits Khashoggi, the Clintons, Macron, Blair and others, we now see how similar they are. Therefore, the death, and alleged martyrdom, of Khashoggi allows us to show what Western democracy truly wants to defend: we will see it stands 100% in favor of modern despotism – either/or monarchical or bourgeois – both in the Orient and the Occident. Non-jingoistic Westerners should not be dismayed at such a thesis: it allows us to increase global unity by showing the similarity of the 1%. Rationalising China’s success is a must across the West, but how do they do it in Saudi Arabia? [dropcap]A[/dropcap] good test to see if someone is a fake-leftist is to get their views on China. Everybody loves Cuba – music, dancing, beaches, cigars – so supporting them is too easy; it takes a real leftist to squint hard at China and see their leftist commitment and beauty. If someone claims to be a leftist but only talks about the only-crimes-and-never-successes of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, instead of their 266% GDP increase since 2008…this person is a centrist at best – i.e. a fake-leftist. (I write from the Lost Decade-denying Eurozone, which is at -12% since 2008) Such persons get seriously annoyed at being properly pegged on the global political spectrum like this…but I did not invent the spectrum. Absolutely everybody is starting to notice China’s huge leaps amid the West’s austerity-imposed suicide. But how do they explain it? Is it the result of their rock-solid socialist constitution, written in 1982? Or is it by accusing the Chinese of having a totalitarian system? Or is it by accusing them of being “radishes” – only red on the outside. Due to their undeniable success, we journalists simply must make some explanation – what did Khashoggi choose? Khashoggi provided the answer in this article run by Saudi media giant Al-Arabiya, Saudi Arabia, the Chinese model and Vision 2030. It’s an interesting article because he basically tries to equate the Saudi monarchical governing class with the Chinese Communist Party. LOL, unexpected, no? The Long March, the Cultural Revolution, the Century of Humiliation – all that produced something…just like the blood-red commie “House of Saud Party”, if you believe Khashoggi! “In fact, the Chinese economy has always been and continues to be a fair economy compared to similar totalitarian regimes. Moreover, the Chinese economy is suitable for all classes of the society and displays a firm determination to fight corruption to the point that leaders, who get involved in corruption, including receiving briberies or committing frauds, are executed. I think Saudi Arabia can achieve the same because of its cultural background. It is an Islamic country….” Seemingly no Muslim outside of Saudi Arabia would say that Saudi Arabia is an “Islamic country”; it is the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” and not even the “Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”. As I related in Part 3, a common line in the Muslim world is “Saudi Arabians are not Muslims, they are Wahhabis.” Beyond the Islamic objections…it is rather hilarious that a total monarchist – a system based purely on class elitism, anti-democratic disempowerment, intimidation, and blood instead of brains – thinks that the House of Saud can all of a sudden produce something which “is suitable for all classes of the society”. Such a misguided idea, since we must classify it in order to fully understand it, is an 18th century idea known as benevolent despotism…and it is totally reactionary. It’s unofficial motto of “Everything for the people, nothing by the people” is not remotely similar in essence or practice to the People’s Democratic Dictatorship in China; it is, however, extremely similar to the ideal in Western Liberal Democracies in the 21st century, as they expound a (allegedly) merit-based, “benevolent technocratism”. Benevolent technocratism – which was essentially the campaign platform of Hillary Clinton, and which provides the justification for (still-failing) economic policy domination by the Eurozone’s “best” economists – is 100% fake-leftism. Benevolent technocratism is the same old despotism of the bourgeois, and thus fake-leftism [dropcap]K[/dropcap]hashoggi’s view of ideal governance is perfectly described for us in this same article: “I like to simplify things for a better understanding before I try to make others understand them. That’s why I try to imagine the National Center as an operating room where in the middle is the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman as the chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs surrounded by ministers, members of the Council, and other experts. Right in front of them, I imagine personal computers linked to the room’s database and a few meters far many screens showing numbers and graphics with goals set for each ministry and government institution. I also imagine the chairman of the Council zooming in on one screen to see the reasons behind flaws and the concerned minister explaining why they occurred and suggesting solutions to tackle them. This system, as I imagine it, is able to make every minister work hard and held accountable. From this scope, can the plan be monitored and its executors held accountable with complete transparency without an elected Council and without the basis of democracy to achieve the success of both the transformation plan and the Vision? Personally, I think this is possible but it can only happen in Saudi Arabia considering its social and cultural background, which is based on Islamic ethos and considering the fact that others have done it as well.” Does anyone not envision Eurozone/EU leadership operating in the same “too smart to be touched by commoners” style? Khashoggi’s vision is basically to be a West European-aping technocracy where the “talented tenth” rules with assumed but unproven moral aims. Khashoggi admits – and without shame – that this fantasy lacks democracy, but this fantasy is also robotic, technocratic, clinical and nearly inhuman. There is no way any of these so-called experts have spent a day sweating in the Saudi sun, yet they sit in total removal from Saudi society and decide policy for 33 millions. (Oh, and they’re all related, LOL; or, like in France, they all went to the same school.) Crucially, because they have the data and computers then of course they will have the same success as China! Too bad political science is not a “science”, and that moral motivations matter. What Khashoggi fails to realize is that China’s “technocrats” get to the top by having a PhD in something not offered in any Western university: socialism (with Chinese characteristics). The US, being not Western Europe, also aspires to ape this aristocracy, but for various reasons they only recently became even less class-mobile than Europe. This is why the loss of Hillary was so significant – it was a blow against this aristocratic technocratism which long-ago swept the West’s intellectual centre, Europe. Contrarily, China’s President Xi spent seven years in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (LOL, or according to The New York Times where he “fled” to), where he taught farmers how to read by firelight. In Cuba an admired and beloved small-town cobbler who just got elected to help keep Cuban parliament real – an unthinkable development in Western Liberal Democracies. In Iran there are plenty of representatives of the lower class all throughout the government, and this policy has been cemented by the totally-misunderstood Basij, which I tried to explain here. Never uttered in the West: they believe that technocratism is more important than democracy “The second frame of reference is China’s huge economic success, comes alongside arguments related to democracy being a precondition for progress. Therefore, we are witness to a new ‘Chinese model’ different from the commonly spread model of Western democracy.” Khashoggi is obviously implying that China has had success despite not having democracy, therefore anti-democratic Saudi Arabia can do the same. Too bad that Khashoggi’s frame of reference – the alleged anti-democracy of China – is not at all accurate. The Chinese frame of reference is “socialist democracy”, which is qualitatively different from “Western bourgeois / liberal democracy”. Calling socialists “anti-democratic” is as false as socialists who say the liberal democratic West is “anti-democratic”: the two are structurally different, making both sides right about each other, but only partially. Liberal Democracy, I must admit, does have certain freedoms socialist democracies do not…these freedoms are not universally-guaranteed, but are reserved for those with money, but that is technically a “freedom”. Again, Khashoggi is failing to see socialism’s motivations, concerns, demands and goals anywhere – he sees Chinese success solely as resulting from technocratism. But in socialist democracy, where non-elite-born hold at least SOME top posts, then we will inevitably find that all technocrats do not interpret all social data the same: this is the exact point of conflict where Western Liberal Democracy totally collapses and reveals its essential, unmodern elitism. Khashoggi, like Macron or Hillary, does not want this socialist-style of representation in their governance, nor do they want socialist-style policies, because such policies are not 100%-focused on maintaining the elitist lifestyle of the bourgeois/monarchical/1% class which they are a part of. But any objective reading of postwar China – a country under blockade, refusing foreign investment, long-banned from top international organisations (like modern Iran), pulling itself out of swamps caused by a “century of humiliation” solely via their own policies, efforts and domestic investments – shows that China’s success is due solely to socialism. The same goes for Iranian Islamic Socialism, which has had similarly spectacular redistributive success amid similar global Cold War. Not so to Khashoggi who, like all journalists and commentators, must find an explanation for China’s astounding success in the past decade: “The reason might be principles of Confucianism”, which is more utter nonsense. China had Confucianism all through their Century of Humiliation…and also totally undemocratic inequality. They had it in the Ming and Ching eras and long, long before…and totally undemocratic inequality. I adore Confucianism, but as a social-moral model – as a political model it is totally outdated. Pushing pure Confucianism is “Chinese Salafism”, and this is what China’s Cultural Revolution explicitly overturned: the political disempowerment of the rural Chinese peasant caused by politically-outdated Confucianism. But a Salafist’s only tool is an old calendar – they want to wax nostalgic and turn the pages backwards, never forwards. Khashoggi is an anti-socialist, monarchy-loving Salafist – he will always only hunt around China’s past for its success, and never objectively examine its present. Trump’s entire “Make America Great Again” hinges 100% on mining an allegedly-perfect late 18th century past. Macron, in combination with EU-technocratism, is a Petainist Salafist – a few days after a far-right assassination plot was uncovered, Macron praised the Nazi collaborator Petain as an inspiration for today. In a time when France’s president enforces detested policies by decree, when democratic votes are ignored across Europe, we should see that there is very little difference between modern Muslim un-democracy and Western un-democracy. The only people who don’t admit this are ethnocentric Europeans, who can apparently subsist on the pride produced by flattering themselves with feelings of superiority, and also by those Christians who refuse to have fraternal feelings towards Muslims as Muslims have towards their fellow Abrahamic believers (those who are also not imperialists, of course). Such flattery is indeed the manna of their far-right, but also the Western fake-left, and this is the point of this article. Fake-leftism means never admitting the small circle democracy is limited to [dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen we start calling things by their proper names, “fake-leftism” becomes more and more obvious in journalists like Khashoggi. Fake-leftism leads to absurdly unreflective statements such as this, which have no basis in modern facts: “Western countries are adept at finding the reasons behind low voter turnout in elections or to determine why people are unhappy with the parliament’s performance.” I suppose Western countries are adept…compared to Arab monarchies. Turnout is quite low and in 2016, when this article was written, any citizen-observer of the Eurozone (as well as the European Union) could see that disapproving performance registered no “democratic” impact on economic policy whatsoever. Both Khashoggi or a self-aggrandising Westerner could have written that sentence – both are fake-leftists. Fake-leftism means someone who is out of touch with what Leftism means on the global scale, as they assume “left” and “right” only matter domestically; but it also means someone who pretentiously believes they are in tune with the average person despite spending their entire lives pointedly avoiding the average person. Khashoggi revealed this in an article titled The Saudi labor ‘shop’ must close, undergo reforms: “I listened to the new Education Minister Ahmed al-Issa talk of his plan to transform education and enable it to produce competitive youth by launching “independent” public schools. He said children in private schools do not exceed 15 percent of the kingdom’s students, while 85 percent attend public schools. This surprised me as I used to think the rate of those in private schooling was higher, since that is the preference of all of my relatives and acquaintances. I discovered then that those of us at the GCF (the annual Saudi Global Competitiveness Forum) are a small minority in a much bigger community that was totally absent, despite being the target of the forum. This community is supposed to be the working class to whom ministers keep promising hundreds of thousands of jobs year after year. Although the organizers want the whole Saudi economy to be more competitive, most citizens who graduate or fall out of public schools and universities are unable to compete. Competition [dropcap]I[/dropcap]f we want King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) to be more appealing than Dubai or the free-trade zone in Ethiopia, for example, we must make our environment more competitive for business investments.” The first paragraph reveals what Khashoggi is: A journalist who was totally out of touch with the 99% of Saudi Arabia…or at least the 85% (“99%” is, of course, not statically accurate, but it has become a useful byword and tool of understanding). He’s also a bad journalist for not knowing such a basic fact of life about his own country – it is reminiscent of a parliamentarian from Macron’s party who recently provoked outrage from a “Yellow Vest” protester on TV because she did not know the minimum wage. I included the 2nd and 3rd paragraph because it’s important to show how abruptly his line of thought ends: Khashoggi does have a class epiphany, and he even relates it honestly…but he blames his fellow citizens for being “unable to compete”. He then drops the idea altogether and moves on to “Competition” and free trade. Furthermore, he clearly believes that in this article he has established a plausible link between societal-domestic-interpersonal competition between citizens and competition between businesses, corporations, trade zones and nations. That is so wrong and so false that I do not have the time to disprove it; if you have to ask, you’ll never know, as Louie Armstrong said about jazz. “Arab citizens are losing faith in democracy even though it has been at the forefront of their demands.” Reading Khashoggi finds that he specialises in this type of nonsense typified by Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, truly one of the world’s greatest fake-leftists. (Indeed, it is amazing that such a warmonger and elitist votes for the “left party” – only in the West…) For the average Muslim or Saudi Arabians it is just as shocking to see Khashoggi described as a “reformer”. Again, there is no difference in 2018 between the Oriental or the Occidental despot. Anyway, the truth is that Arab citizens are losing faith in one type of democracy – Western Liberal…and so are Westerners themselves. This realisation is great because it increases global unity, so why resist it? Socialist Democracy, however, is in bull form in any country which can withstand the decades of capitalist-imperialist blows, and the failure to recognise these trends and to abandon socialism makes someone a fake-leftist, as we all know. I could go on and on dissecting Khashoggi’s writing for “fake Muslim leftism”, but the point has been established. I doubt anyone with an income under $100,000 / not working at a major Western NGO thought for a single moment that Khashoggi was a “reformer”, but hopefully this article showed how he is truly no different from Western rightists, centrists and fake-leftists. Conclusion: Why care for Khashoggi? Why anything in the Muslim world? Answer: more imperialism [dropcap]W[/dropcap]estern shareholder control of Aramco would give them the most powerful economic weapon in the world today. Talk about Google and Apple and smartphones all you want, but the global economy rises and falls according to the price of oil; because of this fact, Western capitalist logic dictates that they must control oil-producing nations. The introduction of Western Liberal Democracy & their constitutional monarchy in Saudi Arabia would inevitably result in the control of Arabia’s oil by the international 1%. What that nefarious group has now is merely secondary control, with primary control held by the House of Saud. Say what you want about Saudi Arabia – their leaders control their oil, at least. Say what you want about Iran – their People control their oil (which is why the West wants to ban Iranian oil, as if it contained the contaminating ideas of Muslim democracy, Islamic socialism, etc.). Saudi Arabia is also one of the world’s relatively untapped markets for international capitalists, much like Iran. Both nations have economies which are hugely state-controlled – and this cannot be tolerated in neoliberal capitalism, and thus it inexorably moves to change them & to Westernise them. Even if the Pentagon and Tel Aviv want no changes to the status quo in the region, we must see that the forces of capitalism are stronger than the forces of nationalism (or Zionism), and we all see this painfully plainly in Europe today. Crucially, many in the House of Saud are anti-neoliberal (but not anti-capitalist) because they correctly understand that the monarchy cannot stand in 2018 without explicitly anti-neoliberal economic measures: two-thirds of all Saudi workers are employed by the government, major welfare programs, etc. Few leftists will objectively remark on this fact, but that is leftist economics in a very significant, real-world sense: Just as all capitalism is not “neoliberal”, not all socialism is “perfect socialism”, and the House of Saud is undoubtedly using socialist-related economics to buy their People’s support. Double-crucially, while the old guard of the House of Saud realises this reality, many of the younger princes do not. Like the younger generation of Westerners, their young princes have been inculcated in anti-socialist neoliberal capitalism, and this inherently imperils the monarchy’s ability to buy off the Arabian People. This line of thinking was rendered excellently by the prolific Whitney Webb for MintPress (whose leftist analyses were not ruined by her study of religion in university, I note) in her article The Real Reason the Knives are Out for MBS, so I only need to make a brief summation here: What is of primary importance to the Western ruling factions are the Aramco Initial Public Offering and the $6 trillion in potential privatisation schemes of Vision 2030. However, as Webb notes: where does Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman really stand on the economic spectrum? Foreign investment into Saudi Arabia has plummeted, the IPO for Aramco (the world’s most profitable company) still has not taken place, and maybe MBS is not such a neoliberal traitor after all? He thus incarnates this shifting conflict between the neoliberal, younger generation of princes (and their Western puppeteers) and the older generation which grasps that neoliberalism – foreign control of a nation’s economy – can only lead to the loss of the monarchy’s absolute control and thus their pampered existence. Let’s not forget why the West needs traitors in charge: Saudi Arabia’s collusion with Washington is what allows the “exorbitant privilege” of the US (petro)dollar, which makes the US financially impregnable; Saudi oil money is truly the liquidity which fuels the many risky investments of Wall Street; the Saudis make enormous US arms purchases not just for themselves but for the entire region. We must look at the defense of Khashoggi by the West via the economic lens (which, of course, is verboten in Western mainstream discourse): how can international high finance finally get full control over Saudi oil, especially if MBS is not so neoliberal anymore yet remains in power? Answer: Reduce the power of the Saudi absolute monarchy to a Western Liberal Constitutional monarchy (like the UK, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, etc.), which would create bourgeois “rule of law” and thus allow Saudi assets to be sold to Western capitalists. I have demonstrated that there are myriad capitalist pressures pushing the West to make Saudi Arabia conform and to not be independent: and, after all, conformity merely means “Western Salafism”, i.e. Western Liberal Democracy in the form of constitutional monarchy. Khashoggi was playing the leading propaganda role in this effort calling for a constitutional monarchy, which amounts to a soft coup against the absolute monarchy of the House of Saud. And that is ultimately why MBS had Khashoggi killed. By killing the West’s head propagandist MBS is saying: there will be no bourgeois, Western constitutional monarchy. The West is so up in arms over Khashoggi because it is a red flag that they are perhaps dealing with a Crown Prince who will not play neoliberal ball, as he had falsely promised to Western puppeteers in order to get their approval to ascend to Crown Prince. Because the Western 1%, and the Mainstream Media they own, wants to obscure this lens – how the defense of Khashoggi fits in with the inevitable capitalist pressure from international high finance to get control over Saudi oil – they thus want us to believe that Khashoggi was a “reformer”. But the West doesn’t care at all about democratically empowering the 99% in Saudi Arabia, of course; and the mere step up from absolute to constitutional monarchy is no “reform” in the 21st century – modern political thought declares that this is a bogus reform. Webb did not stress enough the existence of an alternative – socialist democratic control of Saudi oil. Nor did she stress that Khashoggi was actually facilitating this neoliberal takeover, not hindering it. Khashoggi was no journalist but a pro-Western, pro-neoliberal propagandist – he had no importance to MBS otherwise. Capitalism-imperialism always plays multiple destabilising games at once – in order to ensure their interests prevail: thus, there is no conflict between their supporting MBS but also supporting Khashoggi at WaPo as a back-up plan. However they get control of Saudi resources is fine – whether it’s via a puppet or a soft coup, they don’t care. Khashoggi was no “dissident” against the monarchy, but I’ve reminded readers that this was no problem for the monarchy- and bourgeois-loving West; he was tapped to be the Western 1%’s “Head Saudi Propagandist” because his writings clearly show that he wanted a Western-style bourgeois technocracy & constitutional monarchy in order to rule Saudi Arabia more “efficiently”…which means becoming Westernised as much as possible, economically unequal as much as possible, and Socialist Democratic not at all. Time will tell: Mehdi Ben Barka, PressTV’s Serena Shim and others will be remembered as true martyrs for the Muslim world and for all of humanity; Jamal Khashoggi will soon be forgotten, except for the gruesome details, and that is because he was no friend nor supporter of the People but of the elite of which he was a part and which he unquestioningly and immorally supported. I hope this series shed light on that. But I also hope that this series showed how Khashoggi is no different from the fake-leftists in the Western world. Muslims and Saudi Arabians are not any different from those in any other global region, and emphasising, clarifying and promoting our common humanity – and the common struggles of the 99% worldwide – is the goal of leftism. *********************************** This is the final article in a 4-part series which examines Jamal Khashoggi’s ideology and how it relates to the Islamic World, Westernization and Socialism. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle! ’s Serena Shim: A 4-part series Khashoggi Part 2: A ‘reformer’…who was also a hysterical anti-Iran/Shia warmonger? Khashoggi Part 3: ‘Liberal Democratic Salafism’ is a sham, ‘Islamic Socialism’ isn’t Khashoggi Part 4: fake-leftism identical in Saudi Arabian or Western form [premium_newsticker id=”211406″] ”Self-indulgence has its limits. There are times when reality cannot be blustered through.” A rejoinder to Norman Ball’s “Trump Vs. NPC’s: The Prattle-Whinge Of The Republic“ [dropcap]I [/dropcap]can only laugh at anyone who still supports Trump or fails to understand that he is a distraction and a tool of the same evil masters who control Bush, Clinton and Obama, as well as most of the Western governments and institutions in the world today. Do I despair at the juvenile stupidity of the vast majority of clueless pseudo-“progressives” who call Trump a fascist? Of course I do, but that in no way contradicts the fact that trump is a fascist. Whether by Mussolini’s definition, “corporatist”, or by the 14 Characteristics of Fascism, Trump qualifies as a genuine fascist on every single one. As did Obama before him. As does Clinton. Same shit, different pile. Some Trumpsters try to excuse Trump’s fascist character and actions by saying he is trapped in a totally corrupt political cage that is designed to prevent any real political progress. Of course they too are also right, (about the cage) but like the pseudo-Left, they are right while still being fundamentally wrong. Because they are using a truth to try to prove a falsehood. They miss the point completely. Trump was a puppet and a clown, an idiot and an asshole, a tool of oligarchy, long before he became President. The point is that he wouldn’t do shit, even if he could. He can’t. He hasn’t, and he won’t. And he wouldn’t if he could. Only suckers, chumps and idiots still think he will. The “inconvenient truth”, that the Trump regime “is possibly the most transparent, and potentially the most accountable, in US history”… “who fundamentally changed the framework of accountability and transparency in government” is laughable. That “No President in modern history has put that much accountability into the position of each cabinet member” is impossible to read with a straight face. What kind of idiot could write such drivel? What kind of idiot could believe it? One need only look at those cabinet members and know who they are, to understand this is just another pile of the same old shit. Pence? Bolton? Sessions? Nikki Haley? Pompeo? Mnuchin? Mattis? Betsy DeVos? Kirsten Nielsen? Rick Perry? You gotta be fucking kidding me. These are the fascist minions of oligarchy, as is Trump himself. This is a regime. Just like the one they have in Ukraine.To pretend otherwise is to be as divorced from reality as 47 different gender types. Does Hitler “warrant more dastardly comparables”? Maybe. Trumpsters should ask the victims of Trump’s wars in Ukraine or Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq or Yemen about that. But if the idiot bastard Trump succeeds in starting World War Three, as he certainly seems intent upon doing, Hitler will pale in comparison. Hitler only started World War Two, he only killed millions. World War Three will kill billions. Think about it. The end of life on Earth, at least for most of us, certainly including you and me. And Trump is playing with it like a monkey with a hand grenade. And no one on Earth today is closer to pulling the pin than the simian fascist Donald Trump. The “prattle-whinge” of the Trumpsters is as dangerously stupid, as erroneous, and as worthless and contemptible, as that of the so-called “Left” who decry Trump’s genuine fascism while supporting Clinton’s genuine fascism. A mirror image of the same idiocy, the same Pavlovian knee-jerk reaction of noticing the speck in the other’s eye while missing the log in your own. There is a word for people who criticize in others what they themselves do as well. That word is “hypocrite”. There is a word for people who support Clinton, or still support Trump after two years of his pompous and highly dangerous misrule. That word is “idiot”. The false dichotomy between “Right” and “Left” is what has neutered the political will and the political power of the American People. As long as you fight each other, you are utterly impotent, and your masters, your real enemies, will continue to fuck you, your family, your nation, your future and the world, to death, using tools like Donald Trump. Their impudence is the measure of your impotence. And just look at how impudent they are! {And speaking of impudence, Ball’s criticism of Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader, while he extols the fake “populism” of Trump, really goes beyond the pale. Hedges and Nader are the titans of US political science in the 21st Century, modern versions of Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, respectively. They have not years, but decades, of real populist activism behind them and remain at the forefront of US political thought. Trump”s “populism” extends to bullshit promises that will never be fulfilled..} Trump is not anyone’s savior, and those who delude themselves into thinking that there is any difference between him and the scum who came before him are not only wrong by every empirical measure, but they are childish and cowardly as well – they pretend that Trump will do what only they themselves can do, and they abdicate their own responsibility for their lives and futures by pretending he will fix things. He hasn’t, he can’t, and he wouldn’t if he could. HE WON’T. To pretend otherwise not only invites ridicule, it is dangerous to the point of being suicidal. Before reading further, read the below and follow the link to pick up a copy of Texas’ war diary – The Donbass Cowboy There is no “peaceful” political process, no political figure, who can save the people of the West, and especially the USA, from what is clearly coming, and which they will certainly deserve if they let it. Elections and politicians are worse than useless, a distraction, a continuation of the status quo, or worse. They are a huge waste of resources – human, economic, intellectual, chronological. Think hard about that last one – chronological. “So let us not talk falsely now. The hour’s getting late.” Indeed it is. If you want to know what’s in store for the USA, look at Ukraine. A failed state. Undrinkable water. No heat for millions. Ecological and economic rape six ways from Sunday. Utterly corrupt oligarchs and politicians who loot the nation and the people of every possible resource, who ruin the country and its future, then skedaddle with their billions as Yatsenyuk did, as Poroshenko will, as Tymoshenko will. (As Trump and Clinton will.) And do you really think there will be any difference when ukrops vote between Poroshenko and Tymoshenko? Just as much difference as between Trump and those who came before or whoever comes after. But I will say what any intelligent person will always say, or at least always consider – “I could be wrong.” And if I am, I will be glad to admit it. So, get back to me, Trumpsters, the day Trump puts Clinton or Obama or Bush or any billionaire in prison, the day Trump orders the withdrawal of all US troops from Syria, the day he cuts off 100% of US support to ISIS terrorists or the nazis in Kiev, the day Trump outlaws paperless voting machines, the day Trump starts a real investigation into 9/11 or the Pentagon’s missing trillions, or cuts one single dollar from the US military budget. Till then, thanks for the laughs, idiots, and STFU. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, so they say, even idiots. A Kalahari Bushman may have an opinion about rocket science, an eight year old kid may have an opinion about neurosurgery. It’s their right, but they’re always gonna be wrong. Because they may have a right to their opinion, but it doesn’t mean they’re qualified to have it, it doesn’t mean it is anything other than sheer idiocy to utter it, it doesn’t mean that it is not extremely dangerous and stupid for anyone to give it any credence. Trump is a piece of shit. Clinton is a piece of shit. Anyone who can still support either of them is literally as stupid, as disgusting, as dangerously insane as any other coprophage. And it is better for coprophages to keep their mouths shut. Trump supporters: following this crude mean-spirited demagog for a load of profoundly misguided reasons. But let us recall that the Democrats—the liberals and their endless treacheries—made Trump inevitable. Words from an Irish patriot— [dropcap]W[/dropcap]e have been conditioned since our formative years to believe that we live in the world’s greatest democracy. Our Republic, it is said, is one that represents the will of the American people and runs by the consent of the public. Yet, as time elapses and we keep witnessing the dysfunction of our government, more and more people are realizing that we are living in a kleptocracy where the influence of the wealthy outweighs the will of the people. The other day, Richard Blumenthal, the Senator from Connecticut, was being interviewed on CNN as he was bemoaning the state of our union. With news of Trump firing Attorney General Jeffery Sessions, Senator Blumenthal was feigning indignation and sounding the alarm that “our democracy is under attack”. Wish it were so, our supposed democracy has been invaded and annihilated by self-seeking politicians and their rapacious corporate benefactors a long time ago—we are a Republic in name only. The inversion of our government from public providers to private abettors was accomplished way before January 20th, 2017. The only thing different now is that Trump’s boorish behaviors, megalomaniac pathology and insidious rhetoric has lifted the government’s veneer of authority and exposed it for the carnival of gluttony it truly is. Democrats and Republicans are not opposing parties but colluding factions, their infighting and bickering is carefully stage crafted theater that masks over how both parties are conduits of the neo-aristocracy. Blumenthal: What me worry? With a $100 MM fortune, he's light years from the unpleasant reality defining the lives of most ordinary people. It is fitting that Senator Blumenthal was the one decrying the assault on our democracy given the infiltrators are mercenaries of corporatocracy. Our boy Richard, after all, is a man who belongs to the same gentry who rule our country with their bank accounts and capital extortion. The senior Senator from Connecticut has a net worth north of $100,000,000 and lives in a massive mansion in Greenwich that has two acres of land and thirteen rooms. His top campaign contributors are law firms and financial investment companies and counts private hedge fund company Blackrock as his number one briber. Make no mistake about it, legalized bribery and extortion is exactly what takes place in our nation’s capital on a daily basis. Cash is exchanged for favors between politicians and plutocrats in ways that make [any corrupt regime] look like a bastion of integrity by comparison. Senator Blumenthal is not an outlier but the norm; politics has turned into a cash cow for professional hustlers who seek public service to enhance their private fortunes. How fitting then that we have a supposed billionaire residing in the White House; we are being represented by people who live like sultans while grounding their constituency into the salt land of poverty and dependency. If we had a truly free and open press, journalists would be working overtime to expose this rank level of graft that has subsumed our governance. Sadly, the same virus of ego and avarice that has eviscerated our government has likewise felled mainstream media. Moreover, corporations have stealthy taken over every mainstream media outlet and turned would be journalists into Wall Street public relations experts. Instead of covering the corruption and nepotism that has become endemic of our political system, they spend their time churning out stories of sensationalism as they salivate over the blathering of our Neanderthal president. Turn on the news right now and most likely you will hear stories of election shenanigans in Florida and recounts taking place in Georgia, Arizona and beyond. Depending on which channel you turn to, pundits are most likely broadcasting stories of “democracy under attack” from a purely partisan perspective. Fox News and their cohorts on the right focus on voter fraud and the hijacking of our elections while CNN, MSNBC and their ilk focus on voter suppression. But all these stories have one thing in common, they pit the fight between Republicans and Democrats without discussing the broader narrative of how elections are effectively monopolized by these two political parties. The absence of competition from true outsiders is disenfranchising more than 50% of Americans who don’t identify as either Democrat or Republican. [And even those who do vote believing in representation, are folling themselves, except for a tiny minority.—Eds) Last Tuesday, Tim Canova lost his bid to unseat Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He knew already that the odds were stacked against him from the outset; running as an independent against the racket of the Broward County Democrat party is akin to running against Usain Bolt with your legs in shackles. But even by the standards of gamed advantages that typifies the duopoly, last Tuesday’s election results from Florida’s 23rd Congressional district were laughable. Canova, who lost to Wasserman Schultz by only 13 points in the 2016 in the Democratic Primary and ran a campaign that caught the attention of disaffected Democrats throughout Florida and beyond, was only given credit for less than 5% of the votes. Just this year, Canova won a lawsuit against Broward County after he filed a request to examine the ballots of the 2016 primary results only to be stonewalled for a year and a half before it was discovered that the primary ballots were illegally destroyed. The Florida State court ruled that the destruction of ballots was unlawful, as was the failure of the county to produce the ballots so that Canova could inspect them. The vote rigging and election thievery that is commonplace in Florida is endemic of our wider politics, a ballot restricted to two false options does not make a democracy. When it comes to public life, illegal behaviors beget consequences. In politics, however, illegality is par for the course and lead to zero repercussions. Brenda Snipes, the same county supervisor of elections who oversaw the 2016 Democratic primary, was overseeing the election last week. Yet again, we were treated to stories of ballots being shipped off mysteriously as the Democrat party delved in the same vote rigging that doomed Bernie Sander’s candidacy and gave the nomination to Hillary Clinton. A 2014, a study conducted by two professors from Princeton and Northwestern, compared the influence of average Americans to that of the most affluent in our nation. They concluded that the American public has nearly zero representation in our government while the richest 1% have a near total monopoly on the policies that are implemented on national, state and local levels. Two of their main conclusions were as follows: We are entrusting power to people disconnected from the challenges we face on a daily basis. Alas, folks who live like royalty and whose wealth is dependent on transfer up economy will never represent our interests. Click To TweetAlthough Canova lost the battle against an entrenched politician, I commend him for trying to take on the establishment. After he saw the lurid business of the two major political parties and came to the realization that corruption was baked into their ecosystem, he decided to buck the party instead of being a party to deception. We need to stop being fooled by optics and the slick talking points, we can’t fix our broken politics by changing faces without addressing its foundation of fraudulence. Media magnifies rarities and warps reality; even though we are led to believe that America is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, the truth is that the vast majority of Americans, when you include people who are not registered or don’t vote on a regular basis, belong to neither party. There is a vast desire by most Americans for a change from the status quo. There is a quiet rebellion of people who don’t want anything to do with these two corporate owned clubs who pretend to speak for us. Establishment voices only go along with the charade of a nation split down the middle between two parties because there is money to be made in splintering the citizenry and perpetuating political strife among us. When we have a critical mass of Americans who refuse to be snookered by crooked politicians and duplicitous media personalities, we can one day have a government that works for us instead of one that works us over. This is not a representative democracy but a reprised corporatocracy. The median net worth of Congressmen and Senators is just over $1,000,000 while the White House is a who’s who of Fortune 500 robber barons. We are being led by millionaires and billionaires while more and more Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. To hide this inconvenient fact, mainstream media and politicos on all sides keep manufacturing outrage and train us to fight over red meat issues. Until we get money out of politics and break up the two party cartel that has subverted the constitution and rule of law in Washington DC, we will keep getting a government that gives ‘we the people’ platitudes while transferring our resources and livelihood to plutocrats. “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” ~ Thomas Jefferson Words from an Irish patriot— Featured voices: Luciana Bohne • Eric Schechter • Brad Holhut • John Steppling • Peter Pavimentov • Che Guevera My friend and comrade Luciana Bohne just replied to my query for her opinion on this rising wave of people of some prominence in leftist cicles recommending a vote for the Democrats in this election. I presented a couple of examples on this page, one by Andrew Levine, the other by Paul Street, both writing on Counterpunch, a publication that needs to be handled with caution. This is what Luciana said, upon reading a passage from Street's piece (What Debate? Some Strategic Electoral Considerations)—PG Luciana Bohne Alright, Patrice, I’ll bite. This is what I wrote to Paul on his page. “P Louis Street look, I’ve already seen a few knee jerk reactions to this piece. Reactions that are clearly not seeing the qualitative change we are experiencing under the rule of 45’s regime. Folks are falling back on what seemed, and was, in my view, correct before, that voting the lesser of two evils is still evil and that is what got us here in the first place. Therefore, don’t vote for either cuz it only encourages the bastards. (No offense to bastards). But, perhaps, we’ve finally seen enough of the quantitative changes over time... and our previous (Marxist) analysis no longer holds true. Perhaps we’ve now gotten that qualitative change... and the new thing we are analyzing requires fresh eyes and a freshly cleaned slate on which to perform the now needed new calculus. Levine’s article was crap. Basically saying vote Dems cuz they suck less and then hold their feet to the fire - which is nonsense because there is no (legal) mechanism to hold these servants to capital accountable. Your piece is entirely different yet I’ve already seen a few folks try to lump them together as if you are both making the same argument, for the same reasons and expecting the same outcomes. I’ve had a glass of wine or so... but I’m thinking this cycle isn’t the same as the last one... that we’ve been witnessing spirals rather than circles... and perhaps folks, especially Marxists, might revisit the voting question given the very real, new, objective conditions we find ourselves in. I’ve not thought too much about all this til today... but that’s what I got for now. Ya’ll chew on that and I’ll get some more wine and see what develops here????????✊” <...> NONE of these options will solve the huge problems that our society is facing (war, poverty, ecocide, etc). I've heard some people claim otherwise, but I haven't found their arguments convincing at all. So, in broad terms, ELECTIONS ARE USELESS AND IRRELEVANT.I do have some hope for the future, but IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ELECTIONS. It is based entirely on other communications -- writing and handing out leaflets, or publishing something like the Greanville Post. We have to hope that awareness will spread, and that a large enough portion of the working class will be awakened so that we can have a revolution. (On the other hand, election day might be a particularly good day for handing out leaflets.) Now, having said that elections are useless and irrelevant, I will now take that back, but only in a VERY MINOR way. I think elections have some use, though it is far outweighed by the leaflets, publications, etc. Here it is:If you judge that one of the money parties is working to destroy the world faster, then vote for the slower one; that gives us more time to overthrow both money parties. Or, if you judge that one of the money parties is more cruel, vote for the other one. That doesn't solve the world's problems, but we still have to live in this world while we spread awareness.On the other hand, if the two money parties seem equally evil to you, then vote for some third party, e.g., the Greens. That third party won't win, but maybe they'll get enough votes that a few more people will hear about them and their ideas. That's one more method for spreading awareness. Eric's arguments, as usual, are thought-provoking, to say the least. While it's hard to dispute his utilitarian logic in this case, my problem is that all political situations are dialectical, dynamic, and in that sense, Eric's "categorical margin of benefit" to call it that, assigned to the Democrats as exponents of the "lesser evil", could actually dissolve faster by a strong vote of confidence, since they could and probably will read that endorsement as a shield for a faster process of delivery of the common interest to the plutocracy. If so, we would shortly find ourselves at the same place as before, with the imagined advantages of a "kinder" corporatist rule virtually evporated before our eyes. Let us not forget who te Democrats are in bed with now, from the CIA to tge FBI and the Pentagon, besides teh customary Neocon zionists and Wall Street...nor that it is they, in the main, who have pursued the McCarthyite Russiagate hoax and the criminalisation of free speech using the "Fake News/Russian meddling in our democracy" psyops. Peter Pavimentov The problem as I see it, is personality politics which are directly an outcome from identity politics, i.e. fault is ascribed for the present state of chaotic affairs onto a few people and a property-controlling tribe. Granted they are the dregs of society, but then dirty foam always rises to the top in human cohabitation under old fashioned systems like feudalism and capitalism. Trump is not the problem by himself; the whole society is, as clearly and succinctly laid out by Street in his article on this website. Blaming this or that politician does not solve the real underlying disease, namely the utter unreality of a pyramidal form of society, whereby the base supports the rest. Being fearful is advisable because should power devolve onto the other party then the status quo of all the delusion and exploitation will continue. Voting will be no solution, not even for creating a temporary one. What is needed is a total inversion of the deeply harming qualities of this chattel ‘civilization’. Everyone is bound, from men to women to children and what needs per force to change is the way people perceive their environment and relationship to each other. Eisenbud is correct in her comments that the Judeo-Christian principles have distorted human perception so that deep violence and rape of humans and earth are rights given by a (male) God. The inviolate paternalism of Judaism has imbued all of Christianity (and Islam) with the rights to oppress the less powerful and it is in fact what Marx and Engels battled against. Once the fallibility of humans is realized (the instinctual wisdom of wild animals would be a very good example), maybe then a more just and safe societal structure can be contemplated. Until then the best one can do is to struggle each according to her/his demands, even if it is only scratching at the iron pilons that support this structure as sooner rather than later the simple need to survive will bring it down. |
