The Empire Strikes Back
The destruction of Palestine is the destruction of humanity
Three years since the Rebels blew up the Death Star by flying X Wings into it and dropping a bomb, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) sees the rebels defeated by the Empire. Skywalker trains with Yoda in preparation for a showdown with Vader, who reveals he is Luke’s father.
Three years later, Deathstar 2.0 probes the galaxy for populations to exterminate. The Rebels win the day again by flying planes into it and blowing it up.
Eighteen years on (2001, if you’re losing track) another rebel alliance flew planes into the global economic Deathstar, the World Trade Centre.
The events of 9-11 were so historically unprecedented, so mind-bogglingly dramatic, that they require a large lens through which to fully interpret their meaning. The Law of Time is such a lens. [Jose Arguelles]
Jose Arguelles, author of The Mayan Factor, which introduced his Wavespell revision of the classical Mayan Calendar, and Time and the Technosphere, a masterwork on time, called 9/11 “the inevitable event.” Inevitable because humanity has departed from the Law of Time, which in essence comes down to:
Time = Art.
Having departed, we are lost in illlusion, which in essence comes down to:
Time = Money.
The best known event of the 21st Century is not known at all. Most of us don’t want to know. Those three numbers—the US emergency phone number—are enough to slam the door, as if delinquents had knocked, demanding trick or treat. We don’t want trick or treat. We want Normal. Thing is, outside that slammed door, Normal is long gone.
Arguelles saw 9/11 as the gateway into the post-truth era.
Quite simply, the destruction of the Twin Towers defines the limit of artificial time. If this is so, what can be expected following this world-shattering event?
The history of artificial time is vivid. Its outcomes are palpable. For instance, open your door and you will see this:
Our subconscious reaction to being under an illlusion is not to break out but to burrow in. Forget opening the door. There is nothing out there, save the desert of the real. With Normal gone, there is no “here”. Everything happens somewhere else. Until of course, it happens to US.
Developing the ideas of the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Russian geophyscist Vladimir Vernadsky, Arguelles documents our departure from the Law of Time via the Gregorian Calendar, the clock and the emergence of the Techosphere, an artificial layer between the biosphere of Gaia and noosphere of humanity (from the Greek noos, meaning mind).
Searching for a suitable illustration, I came across this:
It attends the 2020 paper Whose Story Wins, published by the RAND Corporation of America, “a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.” Odd that the RAND Corporation occupies a .org internet domain.
Whose Story Wins opens with the following paragraph:
In this Perspective, the authors urge strategists to consider a new concept for adapting U.S. grand strategy to the information age—noopolitik, which favors the use of “soft power”—as a successor to realpolitik, with its emphasis on “hard power.” The authors illuminate how U.S. adversaries are already deploying dark forms of noopolitik (e.g., weaponized narratives, strategic deception, epistemic attacks); propose ways to fight back; and discuss how the future of noopolitik might depend on what happens to the global commons—i.e., the parts of Earth that fall outside national jurisdictions and to which all nations are supposed to have access.
If we are able to decode post-truth narratives, we have already found the payload: “weaponized narratives, strategic deception, epistemic attacks.”
But who are the adversaries?
Adversaries—from nation-state actors in China, Iran, and Russia to such nonstate networks as al Qaeda, the Islamic State (IS), and WikiLeaks—have been quickly learning to develop dark approaches to soft power, especially online, in order to undermine American society and other liberal societies and challenge their positions in the world.
And boom! The world is cleaved into US and Them. Any narrative deployed by Them is a “dark approach…to undermine American society and other liberal societies.” Tread carefully. You are currently on such a “dark approach.”
You may want to cast a last glance at the Abbreviations page of Whose Story Wins before beating a retreat and slamming the door on all this.
The bold will sneak a look between fingers clutched in protective reflex to face, at the title of Chapter One:
Dropping the last three letters of that title will remind you of one of Sascha Baron Cohen’s takedowns of America…
Still here? You were warned but still crossed that HTML divider.
Here’s a second chance:
Dark approach it is, then.
Isn’t it odd that the RAND Corporation should seek to update America’s “conceptual arsenal” two decades after 9/11? Weren’t US narratives deployed during and after to reclassify millions of Afghans, then Iraqis, then Syrians from human beings to “terrorists” and later, when atrocities like Abu Graib were revealed by dark approacher Wikileaks, to “non enemy combatants”? Shouldn’t the US have crushed Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange long before they revealed the criminality of American hard power? Maybe, among other maladaptations to the dark approaches of adversaries, RAND laments the fluffing of lines by 9/11 lead actor George W Bush.
Maybe the call is for a superior narrative to Vladimir Putin’s denunciation of US airforce and surface-to-air missile bases around his country as provocation. Or to the Chinese fighters in the wing mirrors of US bombers flying “routine missions” over the South China Sea.
Bending over backwards to uphold RAND’s avowed “non-partisan” mission statement, maybe they’re shaking their heads at US ineptitude in the dark arts of info warfare. The have been caught napping on the laurels of a hard power they assume invincible.
The RAND authors join policy wonk Graham Allison in urging US to move on from Cold War thinking “to accept that spheres of influence will remain a central feature of geopolitics.”
Doing so might be difficult after so many heady decades of U.S. dominance: Yet it could also bring a wave of strategic creativity—an opportunity for nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of the conceptual arsenal of U.S. national security.
A few locked-down years on, strategic creativity has taken leaps and bounds. Liz Truss’s 49 day non-elected tenure as UK Prime Minister was long enough for those in the know to profit by shorting the UK economy.
Truss had one defence for the daylight robbery of UK citizens, AKA rising energy prices: “Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.” Truss didn’t matter much to RAND and their clients. She did her job. The boys bagged their dosh. Small beer compared to what is now unfolding.
Last Saturday, half a million people marched in London to demand an immediate end to Israel’s bombing of civilians trapped the world’s largest concentration camp, Gaza. Among the leftist, ethnically and ideologically diverse crowd, were many Muslims. Among this predominantly peaceful section, were a few who called out “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for God is Great. They are protesting, after all, extreme violence visited upon civilians in the Holy Land.
As Novara Media and others have reported, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman described this peaceful protest against war crimes as “a hate mob.”
Playing Pigsy to Braverman’s Monkey (like her, I reserve the right to use racist language because I am brown) former human rights lawyer and PM-in-waiting, Keir Starmer (I reserve the right to strip him of his knighthood on my Substack) attempted to sound human while defending the indefensible:
As Laura K observes in
The Labour leader insists the only credible approach is a “humanitarian pause” so we can give Palestinians a glass of water before they are blown up with bombs manufactured in the UK.
Speaking at the aforementioned London protest, senior Labour MP Andy Macdonald was yesterday suspended for this rhyming couplet:
We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.
The line he crossed was the phrase “from the river to the sea.” The pro-Palestine lyric—Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea—referring to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, has been redefined as “hate speech” by the Anti Defamation League and other Zionist watchdogs. Hamas use it when they call for the liberation of Palestine, “from the river to the sea.”
These words, like the existence of that violent extremist, Jeremy Corby, raise terrible ghosts for Jews.
Whatever you think of Jeremy Corbyn, and his open dialogue approach to foreign affairs, attempting to understand and relate to Other, rather than denounce and dehumanise as “terrorists,” everyone knows Hamas performs the same role for US and Israel as Al Qaida once did. Hamas, said Binyamin Netanyahu, is part of our strategy. WTF? See my article on adaptive strategies, The Madness of Intelligence.
A series of maps of Israel and Palestine, from the former’s inception by the British Balfour Declaration of 1948 to 2010, are circulating widely on the internet.
It is not difficult to see where this is going. Revisionists claim that, while Israel is given unto the Israelites by God (in the Old Testament), Palestine has no right to exist as it never existed in the first place. A Palestine-free map was produced by Binyamin Netanyahu in the United Nations in New York on 22 September.
The non-existence of historic Palestine is debunked by Jewish historians like Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein. The trauma expert Gabor Maté recommends reading them for a factually accurate, de-weaponised history of the region. In his online response to the ongoing tragedy, Dr Maté called out the “smooth faced liars” in the IDF as “masters of propaganda.” They could, he says, have given Josef Goebels a lesson.
But are they that good? YouTube channel Propaganda & Co points out the obvious flaws in their narrative, with reference solely to articles and videos published by Israeli media. There are no violent images in the video.
As they say in investing: do your own research.
The thing is, they don’t really want you doing that. They don’t want you struggling to understand Ursula von der Leyen’s condemnation of Russia’s cutting off water and electricity to parts of Ukraine as a war crime, and Ursula von der Leyen’s support for Israel cutting off water and electricity to Gaza. [See eg here.]
They don’t want you to understand American and European support for Ukraine’s resistance, including violent resistance, to Russian occupation, and Palestinian resistance, including peaceful resistance, to Israeli occupation. They don’t want you understanding Ukraine’s vote against a ceasefire in Gaza. Or why the Israeli flag was projected on Number Ten Downing Street on October 8, while the Palestine flag is all but illegal. They don’t want you to think what it means that Premier League footballers tweeting “from the river to the sea” will be referred to the police.
They don’t want you thinking at all. They want you to slam the door on dissenting trick or treaters. If you must think, you will think what they what they want you to think.
Who are they? While many Americans go along with US. Many do not. Many have worked out that Joe Biden’s “great investments” in Ukraine and Israel will have no return for them. Forget the eschatological stuff for a moment. The war on Gaza and the attendant war on humanity is big business. BIG business.
We could echo horror writer Stephen King and call they It. The War Machine is not human. It’s machine. Anyone caught in its gears is mince, a de-souled zombie pushed this way and that by the algorithms of profit and control.
The destruction of Palestine oils the wheels of that machine. Its jaws stretch to take bigger bites. Sooner or later, it will bite US. And us,
The answer is not the necromancy RAND is screaming for US to adopt, nor is it flying a bomb into the bowels of the Deathstar. From any humane position, the answer is a ceasfire and the release of hostages and prisoners on all sides.
That may happen, if the War Machine has chewed its guts full. Some sort of half baked clean-up may be regurgitated. Having swallowed the Holy Land, it will move on.
In light of the RAND paper, the statements of Israel to the UN, and the ongoing warping of words, I suggest a simple strategy:
A machine is operating
It is operating its operators
Resist its machinations.