Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls.  And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at “defense” contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc.  Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world.  This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda.  A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely.  Fleeting headlines have been all I’ve noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness.  Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.

Jonathan Crary, in a scathing critique of the digital world in Scorched Earth, puts it thus:

For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear.

I agree with Crary.  During my sickness, I did manage to read a few brief pieces, an essay, a short story, and a poem.  Serendipitously, each confirmed the trend of my thinking over recent years as well as what my bodily discomfit was teaching me.

The first was an essay by the art critic John Berger about the abstract expressionist, avant-garde painter Jackson Pollock, titled “A Kind of Sharing.”  It struck me as very true. Pollock came to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  He was described as an “action” painter who poured paint on large canvases to create abstract designs that were lauded by the New York art world. Some have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The description of Pollock as an untalented pourer, Berger says, is false, for Pollock was a very precise master of his art who was aware of how he was putting paint to canvas and of the effects of his abstractions. His work made no references to the outside world since such painting at that time was considered illustrative.  Berger says that Pollock’s paintings were violent in that “The body, the flesh, had been rejected and they were the consequence of this rejection.”  He argues that Pollock, who died in a drunken car crash in Easthampton, Long Island on August 11, 1956, was committing art suicide with his abstract paintings because he had rejected the ancient assumption of painting that the visible contained hidden secrets, that behind appearances there were presences.  For Pollock, there was nothing beyond the surfaces of his canvases.  This was because he was painting the nothingness he felt and wished to convey.  A nihilism that was both personal and abroad in the society.

Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

Pollock’s story is a sad one, for he was praised and used by forces far more powerful than he.  Nelson Rockefeller, who was president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that his mother had cofounded, called Pollock’s work “free enterprise paintings,” and the CIA, through its Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly promoted it as a Cold War weapon against the Soviet Union’s socialist realism art, even as right-wing congressmen ripped Pollock as a perverse artist.  So in the name of openness, the CIA secretly promoted Pollock’s avant-gardism as real America art in a campaign of propaganda, while the right-wing bashed him as a perverted leftist. This sick double game became a template for future mind-control operations that are widespread today.

At this moment, what was happening in the outside world? For a cultural climate is never separate from events. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. The first atom bomb had been dropped. The apocalypse of the Cold War had been placed on the agenda. McCarthy was inventing his traitors. The mood in the country that had suffered least from the war was defiant, violent, haunted. The play most apt to the period would have been Macbeth, and the ghosts were from Hiroshima.

Today’s ghosts are still from Hiroshima and Macbeth is still apposite, and the ghosts of all the many millions killed since then haunt us now if we can see them. Although their bodies have disappeared out the back door of the years – and continue to do so daily – true art is to realize their presence, to hear their cries and conjure up their images.  While the word freedom is still bandied about in this new Cold War era where the sense of social lostness is even more intense than in Pollock’s time, it often comes from a nihilistic despondency similar to Pollock’s and those who used atomic weapons, a belief that appearances and surfaces are all and behind them there is nothing.  Nada, nada, nada.  A society that Roberto Calasso calls “an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” Berger concludes:

Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times that nourished him, to refuse this act of faith [that painting reveals a presence behind an appearance]: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism that was frenetic, constituted the suicide.

This short essay by Berger about Pollock’s denial of the human body struck me as my own body was temporarily failing me.  It seemed to contain lessons for the augmented realities of the internet and the new Cold War being waged for the control of our minds and hearts today.  Inducements to get lost in abstractions.

Then one day I picked up another book from the shelf to try to distract myself from my physical misery.  It was a collection of stories by John Fowles.  I read the opening novella – “The Ebony Tower” – haltingly over days.  It was brilliant and eerily led me to a place similar to that of Berger’s thoughts about Pollock.  Fowles explores art and the body against a dreamy background of a manor house in the French countryside.  As I read it lying on a couch, I fell in and out of oneiric reveries and sleep, induced by my body’s revolt against my mind. Trying to distract myself from my aches and pains, I again found myself ambushed by writing about corporality.  Both Berger and Fowles sensed the same thing: that modernity was conspiring to deny the body’s reality in favor of visual abstractions.  That in doing so our essential humanity was being lost and the slaughters of innocent people were becoming abstractions. Then the Internet came along to at first offer hope only to become an illusion of freedom increasingly controlled by media in the service of deep-state forces.  Soon the only way to write and distribute the truth will be retro – on paper and exchanged hand to hand.  This no doubt sounds outlandish to those who have swallowed the digital mind games, but they will be surprised once they fully wake up.

Fowles’s story is about David, an art historian who goes to visit a famous, cranky old painter named Henry Breasely.  The younger man is writing about the older and thinks it would be interesting to meet him, even though he thinks it isn’t necessary to write the article he has already composed in his mind. The art historian, like many of his ilk, lives in his mind, in academic abstractions.  He is in a sense “pure mind,” in many ways a replica of T.S. Eliot’s neurotic J. Alfred Prufrock.  The old painter lives in the physical world, where sex and the body and nature enclose his world, where paint is used to illuminate the physical reality of life, its sensuousness, not abstractions, where physical life and death infuse his work, including political realities.  Obviously not new to William Butler Yeats’ discovery as expressed in the conclusion to his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

the old man fiercely defends the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” against all abstractions and academic bullshit, which are the young man’s métier. He accuses the young critic of being afraid of the human body.  When the critic responds, “Perhaps more interested in the mind than the genitals,” the caustic and funny painter says, “God help your bloody wife then.”  He accuses the younger man of being in the game of destruction and castration, of supporting abstractions at the expense of flesh and blood life.  “There are worse destroyers around than nonrepresentational art,” the critic says in his defense.  To which the painter roars, “You’d better tell that to Hiroshima. Or to someone who’s been napalmed.”

Funerals and sudden death of friends and kin happen with mind-numbing frequency in Gaza, due to a depraved but stubbornly supported pro-Zionist US policy. (Fars)

Back and forth they go, as a nubile art student, who is there to help the elderly artist, acts as a sort of interlocutor.  Her presence adds a sexual frisson throughout the story, a temptation to the milk-toast critic’s life of sad complacency.  The wild old man’s rants – he calls Jackson Pollock Jackson Bollock – are continually paraphrased by the girl.  She says, “Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human needs, not abstract theories of grammar. Or anything but the spoken word. The real word. . . . Ideas are inherently dangerous because they deny human facts. The only answer to fascism is the human fact.”

The old painter’s uncensored tongue brought tears of laughter to my eyes and a bit of relief to my aches and pains.  I was primarily taken aback by the weirdness of haphazardly reading a second piece that coincided with my deepest thoughts that had been intensified by my body’s revolt.  The narrator’s words struck me as especially true to our current situation:

Toward the end of my two-week stay in the land of sickness, I read this poem by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children. My sickness turned to rage.

If I Must Die

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love.
If I must die
let it bring hope,
let it be a story.

There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.

That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.

Open source info shows that Navalny was an agent for the Americans and the British, engaged in the foulest and most destructive form of espionage: regime change ops. (TGP AI)

The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”

However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now.

Once the death in a Russian prison of the Western-backed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was announced on Friday, February 16, 2024, it was immediately followed by a cascade of anti-Russia pronouncements whose aim was to not only continue the demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin but to serve other purposes as well.

Editor's Note:  Washington has apparently come up with a new definition of terrorism: “Anyone who has the audacity to harm our CIA agents working in your country to foment unrest, sabotage & regime-change.” 

With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.

Shortly after, Zelensky, performing his puppet routine while coincidently appearing at the Munich Security Conference – on Saturday, February 17, a day after Navalny’s death was announced – with Navalny’s then widow, said it was “obvious” that Putin had killed Navalny, while Biden pushed for more money for Ukraine’s doomed war against Russia, a U.S./NATO war created by the U.S. from the start with its aggressive military push to Russia’s borders and its 2015 Ukrainian coup d’état that ousted the pro-Russian leader, setting the stage for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022. That Putin told Carlson these obvious facts, while slyly mentioning to Carlson that he understood that Carlson once tried to join the CIA, is now for most people in the West history lost behind the headlines, if it ever were anything more.

All this happened while Russia pushed through Ukraine’s defenses and took the city of Avdeevka, which had long been contested. With each day that passes, it is obvious that Biden’s Ukraine war strategy is that of a desperate politician on the ropes and that Putin has completely outfoxed the American desperados and their NATO European stooges. The MSM prefer to suggest otherwise, that hope is just around the corner if we send billions more dollars and weapons, and if with the help of our British friends, we take the war further into Russian territory and risk a nuclear confrontation. But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.

Now, with cold-blooded cynicism, the Navalny psyop goes into its sanctimony phase, using the widow—maybe a true believer, maybe not, but a very convincing figure in this sordid drama.

I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny. I will continue to fight for our country. And I call on you to stand beside me.@yulia_navalnaya pic.twitter.com/LMvKqgcS8k

— The Anti-Corruption Foundation (@ACF_int) February 19, 2024

Much of the rest of the world has seen through the risible MSM headlines used to delude the public that Russia is the great threat to world peace and stability. Like the previous Russia-gate lies, this ongoing one, coinciding with Navalny’s death, is timed to divert the public’s attention from key ongoing matters.

Room for doubt

Psychologist Paul Ekman: Yulia #Navalnaya could not contain her joy and relief speaking after her husband's death in Munich. "Yulia Navalnaya's reaction is not the reaction of a woman who recently learned about the death of her beloved husband. pic.twitter.com/3NgHUZiKJC

— Maxim Isaev (@MaximIsaev79484) February 17, 2024

Tomorrow and Wednesday, Julian Assange will have his final appeal in a British court to prevent his extradition to the United States. Biden wants this journalist prosecuted for doing the job that the MSM have failed to do: Exposing the facts about the ruthless U.S. killing machine. But the bruhaha about Navalny has rendered the absolute hypocrisy over the torture and imprisonment of the innocent and brave Assange secondary and “inconsequential.” As intended, this has now become an afterthought as the mainstream media’s Russia-obsessed headlines flow uninterruptedly. The New York Times, the key propaganda organ for the Biden administration and the deep state, reports just today that “The gravity of President Putin’s threats is now dawning on Europe” and “Navalny’s Widow Promises to Carry on Opposition Leader’s Work.”  These are typical Times’ rants.  As is its Magazine article headline from yesterday “Marilyn Robinson [the writer and friend of Barack Obama] Considers Biden a Gift of God.”

I don’t think the Palestinians would agree, but then too, their slaughter by Israel with U.S. assistance – more than 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone have been killed so far – and the coming IDF invasion of Rafah, have also been pushed to the back pages or to nowhere by the propaganda about Navalny and Russia.

I won’t mention the Russian election in mid-March that might possibly factor into all this since we all will be dutifully and timely told that the evil killer Putin is a dictator, ignorant, ruthless – add your own adjectives – and is no doubt trying to rig the fair-and-square U.S. November presidential election – for someone, just as he did in 2016.

Nor mention The NY Times article of February 17 by David Sanger and Julian Barnes that the “U.S Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space.”

Everyone knows that the Russians are coming to get us, as they always have. They probably killed JFK, right?

astute piece on how the Turkish broadcaster TRT World refused to post the interview that they did with him. Doctorow claims British intelligence killed Navalny. For some reason, this should not be broached, according to TRT.

Whether Doctorow is right or not, only a very dimwitted person would think that Putin would have Navalny killed. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. Yet the MSM and their government overlords consider most people very stupid and so are trying to blitz them with obvious propaganda through commission and omission. We have heard this story before.

“You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal”

– Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

It’s always encouraging when a country’s military commander-in-chief – President Biden, in this case – announces in advance that he knows how he is going to respond militarily to the killing of three American soldiers at a base that supports an illegal and immoral U.S. “covert” war against Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and all those who oppose the US/Israel slaughter of Palestinians.  Such anxiety to show antecedently that he’s not sitting on his hands is touching.  It’s the kind of announcement that all great military leaders make.  It is the kind of arrogant stupidity that has long been the norm for U.S. presidents who love war but lose them all while masquerading as conquerors.  So it goes, and so it will go.

To add to that, Biden says he doesn’t want a wider war as he creates one, since you can always take him at the opposite of his words. Yet he really has no secrets since his transparent corruption is almost palpable: He supports the Israeli/U.S. genocide in Gaza, the Ukrainian war against Russia, has expanded the war in the Middle East over the past few weeks, and will soon widen it further while the mass media report that he and his cast of fools are trying to “manage” their violent responses to prevent a wider war.  The narrative has it that he is trying to outfox Netanyahu, who has often bragged how he has the U.S.A. in his back pocket.

It is hard not to laugh derisively.  Now Biden issues an executive order to sanction some Israelis on the West Bank, as if this blatant political move to help his election chances with Muslim Americans is an act of moral statesmanship, while the blood of well over 27,000  Palestinians drips from his shaky hands and increases daily.

Biden's slap on the wrist for these vicious fanatics is an insult to the victims.

My guess is that he will, as CIA veteran Larry Johnson suggests, execute his militarily meaningless bombing late today, Groundhog Day, not so much because he has to endlessly repeat similar macho acts of a Napoleon in rags (which he does), but because the South Carolina primary is tomorrow and acts of war are appealing to the state’s military connected voters.  Additionally, to timely “avenge” the lives of the three black soldiers killed in Jordan might help Biden with the crucial black vote in this primary that will positively launch his reelection campaign or set him back on his heels.

Acts of war have long been the magic rabbit American presidents have relied on to bail them out of political jeopardy and to show their macho toughness.  In this case, as in others, such as Trump’s 2013 attack on Syria with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles for the false accusation of Syrian chemical weapons use (a continuation of Obama’s war against Syria), the actual damage inflicted is often minor while the headline grabbing showmanship is major.  That these presidents legally justify these acts of war based on the war authorization Congress passed following September 11, 2001 is telling.  The so-called war on terror and a supine Congress is the gift that keeps giving the warfare state carte blanche to attack and kill whomever it damn well pleases.

In Biden’s case today, these are the actions of a desperado, a war-loving bumbling puppet who is over or under or out of his head as he feigns outrage at the killing of three soldiers who were placed in a spot where their lives were at risk because they were cogs in an imperial war machine.  Pawns in the game.  A very dangerous game in which the Zionists leaders of Israel are as desperate as Biden and whose secret operatives are no doubt plotting a desperate scheme to try to expand the war.  Who is jerking whose chain may be questionable, but the dogs of war are barking.

“When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

As Finian Cunningham has just written, “Biden has led U.S. imperialism out of the quagmire of Afghanistan into an even bigger quagmire in the Middle East. With the goading by his equally brainless political rivals, the Americans are plowing further into disaster.”

No rival politician to Biden dares challenge his allegiance to the Israel Lobby and what the inestimable CIA veteran Ray McGovern calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, (MICIMATT), for they too are captives of it.  A small demurral on this or that minor point they may make, but they essentially support the imperial hubris of the warfare state and its symbiotic relationship with Netanyahu and his ilk.

We are talking about very stupid leaders who have never learned from their losses and are risking a major war.

Cunningham writes, “With over 50 military bases strung across the Middle East in 10 countries and with over 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in the region, the Americans are sitting ducks for the resistance. The advent of drones and newer missile technology is a new realm of warfare the Americans have not adapted to with their land garrisons in remote deserts and gaudy warships. . . . They have no idea what is coming to them given the long history of U.S. aggression, provocation, and illegal occupation in the region.”

this and this.) The savage Israeli attacks on Gaza continue apace with 124 Palestinians killed in the past 24 hours and well over a thousand killed since the ruling.  Spinning the ruling to accord with one’s hopes and well-intentioned wishes will not help the victims of the genocide but will only intimate that international law is somehow still operative when it is not.

So the emperor has no clothes or is dressed in rags and we all await Punxsutawney Joe to tell us which way the wind blows.

“He’s not selling any alibis/ As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes/And say, ‘Do you want to make a deal?”