This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

US nuclear weapons test at Bikini in 1946. Wikicommons.

The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic inequality. In the foreign policy realm, she or he will face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons policy.

Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.

The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. However, that fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S. and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. Citing those very threats, along with China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional conflict with Russia or China.

Thanks to those and related developments, the world is now closer to an actual nuclear conflagration than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And while popular anxiety about a nuclear exchange may have diminished, keep in mind that the explosive power of existing arsenals has not. Imagine this, for instance: even a “limited” nuclear war — involving the use of just a dozen or so of the hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) possessed by China, Russia, and the United States — would cause enough planetary destruction to ensure civilization’s collapse and the death of billions of people.

And consider all of that as just the backdrop against which the next president will undoubtedly face fateful decisions regarding the production and possible use of such weaponry, whether in the bilateral nuclear relationship between the U.S. and Russia or the trilateral one that incorporates China.

The U.S.-Russia Nuclear Equation

The first nuclear quandary facing the next president has an actual timeline. In approximately 500 days, on February 5, 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear accord between the U.S. and Russia limiting the size of their arsenals, will expire. That treaty, signed in 2010, limits each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads along with 700 delivery systems, whether ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), or nuclear-capable heavy bombers. (That treaty only covers strategic warheads, or those intended for attacks on each other’s homeland; it does not include the potentially devastating stockpiles of “tactical” nuclear munitions possessed by the two countries that are intended for use in regional conflicts.)

At present, the treaty is on life support. On February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin ominously announced that Russia had “suspended” its formal participation in New START, although claiming it would continue to abide by its warhead and delivery limits as long as the U.S. did so. The Biden administration then agreed that it, too, would continue to abide by the treaty limits. It has also signaled to Moscow that it’s willing to discuss the terms of a replacement treaty for New START when that agreement expires in 2026. The Russians have, however, declined to engage in such conversations as long as the U.S. continues its military support for Ukraine.

Accordingly, among the first major decisions the next president has to make in January 2025 will be what stance to take regarding the future status of New START (or its replacement). With the treaty’s extinction barely more than a year away, little time will remain for careful deliberation as a new administration chooses among several potentially fateful and contentious possibilities.

Its first option, of course, would be to preserve the status quo, agreeing that the U.S. will abide by that treaty’s numerical limits as long as Russia does, even in the absence of a treaty obliging it to do so. Count on one thing, though: such a decision would almost certainly be challenged and tested by nuclear hawks in both Washington and Moscow.

Of course, President Harris or Trump could decide to launch a diplomatic drive to persuade Moscow to agree to a new version of New START, a distinctly demanding undertaking, given the time remaining. Ideally, such an agreement would entail further reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals or at least include caps on the number of tactical weapons on each side. And remember, even if such an agreement were indeed to be reached, it would also require Senate approval and undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance from the hawkish members of that body. Despite such obstacles, this probably represents the best possible outcome imaginable.

The worst — and yet most likely — would be a decision to abandon the New START limits and begin adding yet more weapons to the American nuclear arsenal, reversing a bipartisan arms control policy that goes back to the administration of President Richard Nixon. Sadly, there are too many members of Congress who favor just such a shift and are already proposing measures to initiate it.

In June, for example, in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025, the Senate Armed Services Committee instructed the Department of Defense to begin devising plans for an increase in the number of deployed ICBMs from 400 of the existing Minuteman-IIIs to 450 of its replacement, the future Sentinel ICBM. The House Armed Services Committee version of that measure does not contain that provision but includes separate plans for ICBM force expansion. (The consolidated text of the bill has yet to be finalized.)

Should the U.S. and/or Russia abandon the New START limits and begin adding to its atomic arsenal after February 5, 2026, a new nuclear arms race would almost certainly be ignited, with no foreseeable limits. No matter which side announced such a move first, the other would undoubtedly feel compelled to follow suit and so, for the first time since the Nixon era, both nuclear powers would be expanding rather than reducing their deployed nuclear forces — only increasing, of course, the potential for mutual annihilation. And if Cold War history is any guide, such an arms-building contest would result in increased suspicion and hostility, adding a greater danger of nuclear escalation to any crisis that might arise between them.

The Three-Way Arms Race

Scary as that might prove, a two-way nuclear arms race isn’t the greatest peril we face. After all, should Moscow and Washington prove unable to agree on a successor to New START and begin expanding their arsenals, any trilateral nuclear agreement including China that might slow that country’s present nuclear buildup becomes essentially unimaginable.

Ever since it acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a minimalist stance when it came to deploying such weaponry, insisting that it would never initiate a nuclear conflict but would only use nuclear weapons in a second-strike retaliatory fashion following a nuclear attack on the PRC. In accordance with that policy, China long maintained a relatively small arsenal, only 200 or so nuclear warheads and a small fleet of ICBMs and SLBMs. In the past few years, however, China has launched a significant nuclear build-up, adding another 300 warheads and producing more missiles and missile-launching silos — all while insisting its no-first-use policy remains unchanged and that it is only maintaining a retaliatory force to deter potential aggression by other nuclear-armed states.

Some Western analysts believe that Xi Jinping, China’s nationalistic and authoritarian leader, considers a larger arsenal necessary to boost his country’s status in a highly competitive, multipolar world. Others argue that China fears improvements in U.S. defensive capabilities, especially the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems, that could endanger its relatively small retaliatory force and so rob it of a deterrent to any future American first strike.

Given the Chinese construction of several hundred new missile silos, Pentagon analysts contend that the country plans to deploy as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly equivalent to deployed Russian and American stockpiles under the New START guidelines. At present, there is no way to confirm such predictions, which are based on extrapolations from the recent growth of the Chinese arsenal from perhaps 200 to 500 warheads. Nonetheless, many Washington officials, especially in the Republican Party, have begun to argue that, given such a buildup, the New START limits must be abandoned in 2026 and yet more weapons added to the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile to counter both Russia and China.

As Franklin Miller of the Washington-based Scowcroft Group and a former director of nuclear targeting in the office of the secretary of defense put it, “Deterring China and Russia simultaneously [requires] an increased level of U.S. strategic warheads.” Miller was one of 12 members of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a bipartisan group convened in 2022 to reconsider America’s nuclear policies in light of China’s growing arsenal, Putin’s nuclear threats, and other developments. In its final October 2023 report, that commission recommended numerous alterations and additions to the American arsenal, including installing multiple warheads (instead of single ones) on the Sentinel missiles being built to replace the Minuteman ICBM and increasing the number of B-21 nuclear bombers and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines to be produced under the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion nuclear “modernization” program.

The Biden administration has yet to endorse the recommendations in that report. It has, however, signaled that it’s considering the steps a future administration might take to address an expanded Chinese arsenal. In March, the White House approved a new version of a top-secret document, the Nuclear Employment Guidance, which for the first time reportedly focused as much on countering China as Russia. According to the few public comments made by administration officials about that document, it, too, sets out contingency plans for increasing the number of deployed strategic weapons in the years ahead if Russia breaks out of the current New START limits and no arms restraints have been negotiated with China.

“We have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea, and air legs [of the nuclear delivery “triad” of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers] that could offer national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Policy Vipin Narang on August 1st. While none of those options are likely to be implemented in President Biden’s remaining months, the next administration will be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the future composition of that already monstrous nuclear arsenal.

Whether it is kept as is or expanded, the one option you won’t hear much about in Washington is finding ways to reduce it. And count on one thing: even a decision simply to preserve the status quo in the context of today’s increasingly antagonistic international environment poses an increased risk of nuclear conflict. Any decision to expand it, along with comparable moves by Russia and China, will undoubtedly create an even greater risk of instability and potentially suicidal nuclear escalation.

The Need for Citizen Advocacy

For all too many of us, nuclear weapons policy seems like a difficult issue that should be left to the experts. This wasn’t always so. During the Cold War years, nuclear war seemed like an ever-present possibility and millions of Americans familiarized themselves with nuclear issues, participating in ban-the-bomb protests or the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. But with the Cold War’s end and a diminished sense of nuclear doom, most of us turned to other issues and concerns. Yet the nuclear danger is growing rapidly and so decisions regarding the U.S. arsenal could have life-or-death repercussions on a global scale.

And one thing should be made clear: adding more weaponry to the U.S. arsenal will not make us one bit safer. Given the invulnerability of this country’s missile-bearing nuclear submarines and the multitude of other weapons in our nuclear arsenal, no foreign leader could conceivably mount a first strike on this country and not expect catastrophic retaliation, which in turn would devastate the planet. Acquiring more nuclear weapons would not alter any of this in the slightest. All it could possibly do is add to international tensions and increase the risk of global annihilation.

As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan research and advocacy outfit, put it recently: “Significant increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.”

A decision to pursue such a reckless path could occur just months from now. In early 2025, the next president, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will be making critical decisions regarding the future of the New START Treaty and the composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given the vital stakes involved, such decisions should not be left to the president and a small coterie of her or his close advisers. Rather, it should be the concern of every citizen, ensuring vigorous debate on alternative options, including steps aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals. Without such public advocacy, we face the very real danger that, for the first time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet, with billions of us finding ourselves in almost unimaginable peril.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Ensuring the Collapse of Civilization? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael T. Klare.

As a surging Harris/Walz team draws ecstatic crowds, the GOP's "giant weirdos" are flailing, name-calling, spewing "a firehose of cray-cray" and working hard to alienate every woman in America. After Trump claimed a Harris crowd of 15,000 "DIDN’T EXIST," fellow-fascist Elon Musk threw him a two-hour lifeline on X. It did not go well: tech glitches, slurred lies, banal bunk. Facts owe. The GOP is a crazy-town "clown car hitting a brick wall." Been there, done that, not going back.

Their indignant protests notwithstanding - punching down is unacceptable! - Republicans really have gotten head-swivelingly weird. Most of us already know this, but if you need more proof, here's MAGA at its most delusional: See-Sheep-Surrender cranks from the Daily Show, The Good Liars, a drunk "college-means-devil-worshipping, baby-blood drinking Dems" Roseanne, and a blessed-be-the-fruit Rep who wants us to return to a misgynistic Gilead. Meanwhile, malignant, money-grubbing "lawmakers" like Ted Cancun, trying to avoid revealing "ideas" like killing Social Security and Medicare, can only shriek about Kamala taking away their steaks, cheeseburgers, plastic straws or gas engines - "Why does he think anyone wants any of his crap?" - and House "leaders" like James Comer can only propose more sham "investigations" into the cost to Medicaid of Kamala personally sending "an open invitation to the world" to "unload all these illegals" into our pristine country. Just what the ever loving fuck: Idiot Yahoos 'R Us.

Little wonder, then, that even vaguely sane Republicans are deserting the raving, sinking ship of "chowderheads" in droves. They've launched a Republicans for Harris: "Conservatives believe in the Constitution, not a 'man’s' ego. You’re better than Trump." Over 200,000 "faithful, compassionate evangelicals exercising our God-given citizenship" have signed a pledge with Evangelicals for Harris to "reaffirm who (we) are" and vote for someone who "better reflects Christian values"; their first ad features Trump, queried if he's ever asked God for forgiveness for his sins, mugging, "I don't bring God into that picture," and the stark judgment, “Is there any greater denial of Christ (than) to say ‘I do not need His forgiveness?’'’ Dozens of his former staff and Cabinet members have declined to endorse him - some have also called him "a moron" - and even some of his Nazi supporters have publicly revoked their support and declared a "groyper war" against what they see as a demented old man headed for a "catastrophic loss."

In a floundering campaign where even the signs betray their incompetence - seeming to endorse Kamala or tell Trump he's fired - bumbling, lying, wooden J.V. Vance, a creepy weirdo and "insufferable, dead-eyed climber (with) moral malleability," isn't helping. Here, too, signs expose voters' repugnance for him: "Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala," "Ohio Hillbillies for Harris," "Sofa So Bad for Vance," and, in Manhattan with a sinister, double-chinned image of the guy who says reproductive choice is a "snake strangling the American family," "Your Body, My Choice." Among Vance's dystopian views: The country's low birth rate has "made many elites sociopaths," childless journalists are "psychotic," women in violent marriages should stay in them, Americans with children should get more votes than childless people "in New York or San Francisco," law enforcement should have access to women's health care records - all deemed hysterical" by Chelsea Handler: "Listen up, you wingnut elegy. I know a couch fucker when I see one."

Awful new reveals keep coming. Like Vance is a menstrual surveillance freak: He's one of eight GOP senators, along with some Freedom Caucus goons, who support surveillance of women's menstrual records by state law enforcement agencies. An anti-LGBTQ zealot who opposes abortion rights, marriage equality and IVF, he introduced a "Protect Children's Innocence Act" to charge with a felony doctors who provide health care to trans kids - though he does, evidently, like to dress in drag. Newly unearthed audio also reveals him agreeing that grandmothers helping raise kids is "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female" - like his mother-in-law did for him, which is "this weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman," which is "the most transgressive thing I've done" against hyper--liberal (ideas) that are the root of our political problem." America: "What are females for?" and "Childless cat ladies and postmenopausal females: ASSEMBLE." Outraged, many - pols, nurses, CEOS, Margaret Atwood - did.

With an unhinged Trump largely MIA on the campaign trail as his advisers struggle to hinge him back to reality, it's fallen to the feckless Vance to do his job. Alas, he's proven...not great, with many cringe moments. Lacking charisma, experience, policy ideas or a self to call his own, he's sunk to endless lying, swiftboating Walz, trashing Harris while either pretending she's been president or forgetting she wasn't, stalking their rallies because he can't get his own crowds, coming up with lame retorts to Trump sins like befriending Nazis - "the thing I like (is) he will talk to anybody" - and, preposterously, denouncing Dems as name-calling bullies. One response: "Crooked Hillary, Crazy Nancy, Sleepy Joe, Coco Chow, Lyin' Ted, Rod DeSanctimonious, Birdbrain Nikki, Gavin Newscum, Pencil Neck Schiff, Pocahontas and Kamabla would all like a word." Still, he keeps going lower in his grotesque brown-nosing: Boldly ignoring Mr. Bone Spurs' lifelong moral, marital, political and constitutional crimes, he just praised him as "always faithful."

— (@)

Trump, meanwhile, is unraveling. Mercifully, he's mostly golfing, only rarely popping up to rant online, spout "bat-guano-crazy" lies in bonkers pressers, attack or threaten to sue the Times, the government, Georgia et al, and slam a successful former prosecutor, A.G. and senator as "too dumb to debate," "a crazy person," "a bumbling communist lunatic," "a socialist lunatic," "a bitch," and "real garbage" - this, from an old guy in clown makeup and manifest cognitive decline. Increasingly, the world he inhabits bears little resemblance to the real one. Despite his dystopian accounts of a decrepit country awash in violent crime, the economy is thriving and most cities have seen a big drop in crime, including on a southern border with some of the lowest crime rates. His portrayals of "the migrants Harris let in" - they've taken "over 100%" of new jobs created, they're "tough," "mean," "raping our women" - are ugly fiction; some theorize he's so stupid he's confused "asking for asylum" with the "insane asylums" he yawps they've come from.

The hero who "took a bullet for democracy" has angrily rejected the suggestion of his own FBI director Christopher Wray, who should resign for “LYING TO CONGRESS," that his close call came from a teleprompter shard: "It was (a) bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard." He recovered fast enough to launch the new book Save America - $99, $499 signed - featuring bloodied, defiant photos from the event he stole from AP's Evan Vucci. He's also hawking $299, "limited-edition" FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT High-Tops with the same "iconic image (to) honor his unwavering determination and bravery," much like his $299 Never Surrender Low Tops. So all good on the grifting. But his judgment's iffy: He's waving to imaginary crowds, flying around in Jeffrey Epstein's (badly vetted) old plane, and frequently summoning "the late great Hannibal Lecter," a fictional cannibal-killer - because, his spokesman explains, "he's an inspiring and gifted storyteller, and referencing pop culture is (why) he can successfully connect with voters." LOL.

In truth, many argue with overpowering evidence, Trump's crazy-pants antics and word salad keep getting worse as his fortunes decline, and his mental health should be much more recognized and discussed than it is, notwithstanding the absurd, obsessive probing of Biden's lapses. "Trump is a deeply unwell man, a deeply psychologically disturbed individual," says George Conway, who says he's "been yammering about this" for years. "If he was a member of your family, you'd be staging an intervention." Conway cites the same narcissistic, sociopathic traits that have marked authoritarians through history, and the inevitable, "final implosion we're seeing now, like Hitler moving around divisions that didn't exist in the Fuhrer bunker in the last 10 days of the war." Of Trump - who regularly makes crackpot claims like he's done more for "the Blacks" than anyone since Honest Abe and "I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL Polls," Conway says, "He. has. completely. lost. it."

Among his recent "true Captain Queeg" moments: Claiming a larger crowd at Jan. 6 than Martin Luther King Jr. for his “I Have A Dream" speech in D.C. King’s speech to 250,000 led to the Civil Rights Act; Trump's speech to 53,000 led to an insurrection. The Borowitz Report duly cited the "huge crowd" of voices Trump hears inside his head: “I have maybe millions of voices, all talking at the same time. How many voices does Kamala have? Maybe one, if she’s lucky...There are people in there from countries you’ve never heard of." There was also his batty charge Harris used AI to invent 15,000 people greeting her in Michigan. “Nobody was there," Trump raved. "This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.” He added, "She "should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!" And he should know. On the myth of the great man humbled by his brush with death, one wrote, "Wow! Such an uplifting message! Keep talking, dotard."

Implausibly, he does in fact keep talking, regardless of the wrangling efforts of harried advisers. It turns out many of the odd cultural references he pulls from his murky swamp of a battered mind - Hannibal, his lumpy clothes, the retro music he chooses, noticeably the Village People's disco hit YMCA, which despite its "hanging out with all the boys having fun" he hasn't yet figured out is a gay anthem - date from the 1980s, "the last time any of his shit functioned." Biographer Tim O'Brien calls Trump "a crypt keeper for the 1980s," when "anybody who matters even pretended they respected him. That’s when he got his picture on Playboy and Time covers. That’s why he thinks New York is a crime-infested murder show. Because, in his brain, it’s the ‘80s outside." That's also why he's been blasted or sued for copyright infringement by so many, mostly earlier musicians - Queen, Springsteen, Aerosmith, Leonard Cohen, Rolling Stones, George Harrison and 30 more - they have their own pissed-off page on Wikipedia.

He's currently being sued by both Celine Dion for hilariously, cluelessly using her ode to a sinking ship from the Titanic movie - a wry Dion: "Really, THAT song?" - and the family of late soul singer Isaac Hayes for using his 1966 Hold On, I’m Comin' without permission. Lawyers say Trump owes them $3 million, a heavily discounted fee given he's been "willfully and brazenly engaged in copyright infringement," despite their complaints, since 2022. Unsurprisingly, musicians' fury at a slimy Trump echoes many others'. Neil Young: "You are a disgrace to my country." Johnny Marr: "Consider this shit shut right down right now.” Michael Stipe: "Do not use our music (for) your moronic charade of a campaign." They could add to their call for redress the moronic charade of his compiled "dancing" - stiff-as-a-board, tiny fists clenched, blank stare, malevolent: "It’s rare to see someone dancing with a scowl on their face" - shown at the RNC convention to his enthused, irony-free clones and fans. Conrad: "The horror! The horror!"

— (@)

And it keeps coming. Monday's babbling "biggest interview in history" with Elon Musk - "the two worst people in America" - swiftly devolved into "the incoherent in full pursuit of the unendurable," a "surprisingly dull meeting of two planet-sized egos plagued by technical glitches that only showcased Trump’s inability to complete a sentence." Trump trumpeted the X event with a plea for money - "We're calling on TEN MILLION Patriots to donate ANY AMOUNT" - and an operatic ad with Nazi marching music: "They're not coming after me, they're coming after you. Justice will be done." But first there was 42 minutes of silence broken only by "Muzakesque hold tunes," a tech debacle that for sure had nothing to do with Musk having promptly fired 80% of his workers, or "almost everyone who knew what they were doing." Trump later: "You're the greatest cutter." Still, many suggested it's maybe not a great idea to put in charge of Mars space trips or nuclear arsenals people who can't figure out how to run a live-stream in 2024.

The Harris/Waltz campaign was quick to mock the spectacle of two muted "self-obsessed rich guys, or whatever that was." They also posted Trump's snide blast of DeSantis' earlier "complete failure to launch" when the same thing happened to him in what one pundit called "another Musk trainwreck - the guy is like the Zodiac Killer of campaigns." Though Musk claimed he'd run multiple tech tests earlier, the sound when it finally came on was so weird, with Trump slurring and lisping, that social media dubbed him "Daffy Cuck" and #DentureDon. Still, many argued the "banal chatter" of a dysfunctional "dumpster fire" of "toxic masculinity and breathtaking mendacity," like "sitting with two drunks at a bar trying to set the world to rights" as Musk snickered, kowtowed and guffawed through Trump's unchecked rambling - Trump: "I know Putin, President Xi, Kim Jon Un, all of them." "Yeah, cool," gushed Musk, whose platform is banned in North Korea - made them crave the prior, peaceful 40 minutes of wallpaper music.

The two-hour babble: 60 million immigrants invading, Harris destroyed San Francisco, California, the sun, "they just took (Biden) out back (and) basically shot him," 35 states will do as well as Norway with no Dept. of Education, Russia defeated Napoleon - "It’s very unfair" - and, in "the dumbest climate conversation of all time," there'll be "more waterfront property - not a biggie." Pontificated Musk, "We’re at a fork in the road of the destiny of civilization." Then he asked fans for highlights he didn't have, and claimed 73 million listeners. Print media said it was a few hundred thousand. Trump, who measures his worth in numbers - ratings, buildings, money - said they "broke every record with many millions of people." But they seemed prickly, defensive. When the EU warned Musk of fines for violating their social media law on misinformation, he replied, "TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!” When a reporter asked Trump aides about the lisp, he was told, "Must be your shitty hearing." Worse for the unloved boy whose greatest fear is being laughed at, a long-lost SNL video mysteriously resurfaced. Hellspawn, indeed.

— (@)

This week, the weird guys kept yammering. A small crowd came to hear clumsy Vance in Michigan: "It's a little hot today but it's a beautiful state." He emitted a crock of ugly bullshit: "Kamala's green energy scams," tens of millions of illegals, no more steak, she "forced Americans to buy EVs made in China - it's the carburators that suffer," she "pretends to stand for normal people," she's "laughing and dancing while Americans lose their children to fentanyl," she's "been in charge of the government (sic) for almost 4 years and hasn't done a damn thing." Trump is likewise in "his happy place" - bravado, vindictiveness, insults, lies. In one golf course presser that "did him no favors," he told at least 162 lies in 64 minutes, what Pete Buttigieg called "the Olympics of lying." At a small rally in North Carolina, he did his "greatest hits of weirdness" while holding Tic Tocs in each hand. Mild Walz will usher in World War lll: "We've never been this close." Kamala, with "the laugh of a crazy person," is "the worst vice president in history."

Then, a dutiful half-pivot to economics: “They say it’s the most important subject." But first, Kamala on the cover of Time: "She was a totally disrespected person six weeks ago." Then windmills as a couple wants to watch teevee: "I'm sorry darling, we can't, the wind isn't blowing." COVID: "We never got the credit we deserved, with all the things we did, the outfits." Insulin: "$35 insulin. I did that." (NOT). Then - pivot! - high prices, fake facts: "Car insurance is up like 82%," empty promises: "We will rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again (with) a person named President Donald J. Trump. Do you know him? He’s a nice gentleman. Your incomes will soar, your savings will grow..." Then another golf club, more bombast - "The wind is ruining everything!" "You'll be thrown into a communist system where everyone gets health care," he's "entitled" to insult his opponent - from "meanderings into the muck his mania," his "laundry list of increasingly bizarre claims that (push) the envelope in new and astonishing ways."

His "campaign," it is widely agreed, has "entered the please-shut-up phase" with its "manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy" discord, all born of his fragile ego and sick need for attention. Thus did a fabulist who from the start portrayed a fictional America of chaos and "carnage” then forge it, denying the trauma, damage and loss it inflicted. "His campaign is yesterday," said one sage, with his solipsistic phobias and tiresome grievances; Harris/Walz is tomorrow. Calm, smart, joyful, capable and leading in most swing states, they are greeted by euphoric crowds hungry to heal, come together, move past the wreckage born of his "savage incompetence." "Dear White Christians," wrote pastor John Pavlovitz too long ago to those who mistook Trump's evil for good. "Now you get to be brave, and leave behind supposed people of faith who betray (virtue) for a bag of coins or a SCOTUS seat...It's time to admit that this was all a horrible mistake." Socialist lunatics, onward.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Image by Shalom de León.

It may have taken me decades of careful introspection to find myself amidst the wreckage of decades of institutional trauma, but it seems like every other asshole on the right has my gender identity all figured out the moment they clock me in as trans. I was pretty fucking sure that this was an intensely intimate issue defined by the complex interactions between biology and culture, but according to amateur genderologists like Matt Walsh and those fine young libertarians in the Mises Caucus, my entire existence and that of millions of others can be boiled down to a single ideology, and that ideology is some convoluted Marxist conspiracy to erode traditional American values and destroy the very fabric of Western Civilization itself.

While these paranoid fabulists need to cut down a bit on their steady diet of rainwater and grain alcohol, they actually aren’t totally off base. Those stuffy breeders in the Frankfurt School may not have known a tranny from a drag queen if one fucked them in the ass but Third World Marxist movements like Black Power and Aztlán had a profound and tragically under sung influence on the modern Queer Liberation Movement and this is nothing to be ashamed of. Movements to expand revolutionary consciousness frequently empower one another simply by expanding beyond each other’s designated boundaries and blurring the lines that once superficially separated them.

When Stokely Carmicheal boldly reclaimed Blackness as a concept defined by empowered otherness and Chicano firebrands like Oscar Zeta Acosta followed suit, Black and brown Queer folk like Marsha P. Jonhson and Sylvia Rivera were paying attention. And when the streets got wild from Watts to Detroit, it was these gender outlaws of color who decided to bring that same fire to roast the pigs at Stonewall.

At their heart, the Third World consciousness movements of the sixties and seventies were defined by colonized people struggling to recover what was stolen from them by generations of annihilation and assimilation. It was about building new cultures informed by what shreds remained of the old and this is what today’s straight white conservative culture war “experts” remain totally blind to.

While Marxist concepts on class oppression may have strongly informed our approach, much like Afrocentricity and Aztlan, Queerness is a construct defined by a decidedly conservative yearning for traditional values, our traditional values. We are a people in search of a home and this home can still be found if you blow the dust from the right history books.

Long before there was any need for concepts like Queerness and Blackness, the planet was divided into a diverse array of tribal ecosystems, each with its own classes, genders, gods, and spoken histories. While defined by diversity, gender fluidity was rife throughout these primitive cultures. Across nearly every continent, archeologists have found evidence of third genders existing amongst thousands of tribal cultures for thousands of years, from the Iron Age grave markings of Persian antiquity to the Bronze Age figurative art of Ancient Greece.

Many of these traditions relied on unwritten oral histories but some of them still survive to this day and many of those who don’t were recorded by the vicars and conquistadors who annihilated them to make room for their pseudo-Christian imperial new world order. Over 100 third genders were observed to have existed in North America alone during the age of first contact and they were far from the only ones.

In Africa, you had the Ashtami of the Maale in Ethiopia and the Oracles of Mukura of the Ankele in Uganda. In the South Pacific, we still have the ancient Maha of Hawaii’s Kanaka Mauli and the Fa’afafine of Samoa. The Incans had the Quariwarmi, the Ancient Sumerians had the gender-bending servants of Inanna, and Rome had the transgender priestesses known as the Galli.

This is my culture and not only is it older than Western Civilization, but Western Civilization is what razed it in the name of modernity and progress. Christianity may have been the weapon Rome used to cull us, but it was merely one of the countless spiritual traditions of the ancient world that the Ceasars plucked from the Garden of Eden and stripped of its indigenous divinity to use it as a battering ram for the real enemy of traditional divinity, the state and its debauched mutant progeny, empire. This is what destroyed a thousand tribal identities and decimated their people to the point of requiring revolutionary recycling projects like Black Power and Queer Liberation.

And this is what women and gender outlaws have been attempting to revive through populist pagan reform movements like Wicca and Asatru for decades, a spiritual consciousness that reflects our own diverse and ignored personal experiences. Conservative pagans will often take such communities to task for failing their historical purity tests, but the point here isn’t that any single tribal tradition is morally superior to Christianity or capitalism. The point is that many tribal traditions will always be morally superior to any single tribal tradition because humanity is far too diverse and complex to be homogenized in a single melting pot without that cooking implement becoming a genocidal charnel.

The transgender ideology, if any single one exists, is not a symptom of modern decadence. It is an act of resistance against it. So, you are goddamn right that we are at war with your precious civilization but that is only because what you call traditional American values remain an existential threat to any truly indigenous tribal society, new or old. In other words, it is not the Queer Liberation Movement that is modern and decadent, it is the vapid globalist monstrosity of the American Empire. A soulless monolithic corporate culture actively working to transform Queerness into just another brand like Marxism and Christianity.

But I still believe that it is in fact Queer people, and Black people and Chicano people, who must lead a new struggle against state-sanctioned modernity with a revival of truly traditional values like communalism and diversity beneath the banner of a bold new primitivism, not just because it has always been the ‘others’ of the lumpenproletariat who have carried the fire of revolution, from Amistad to Stonewall, but because revival is the only way forward for all of us in a world where the past has been ravaged by imperial conquest.

It isn’t just the traditionally marginalized who have been throttled into submission by imperial homogeny. It is the Irish and the Italians and the Polish and the Germans and all the other cultures erased by toxic modern concepts like race, gender, church, and state. Western Civilization has stripped us all of our traditions and movements like mine have found a way to revive them by embracing a culture of resistance through decentralized tribal diversity.

This is my transgender ideology, a form of Queer post-civ pan-archism beyond left and right. But I’m not here to recruit you; I’m here to encourage you to rebuild your own tribe so that together we can build a thousand tribes, too diverse to be governed by any single power, civilization be dammed.

The post The Real Queer Conspiracy Against Western Civilization appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

Since those Dark Ages, mankind has developed the ability to accurately track and predict our own demise. Vast networks of satellites and other data monitoring tools are informing us that the planet is becoming increasingly more inhospitable for the vast majority of life on Earth, yet we plod onward, ignoring another plea by the world’s scientists. A reassessment of the Limits to Growth Study and its World3 model using different calibrations was done 6 months ago and the results are the same, which is to say that humanity is still following business-as-usual and heading for collapse within the next two decades:

…the model results clearly indicate the imminent end of the exponential growth curve. The excessive consumption of resources by industry and industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.

All the expertise and modern technology we possess will not be coming to save us; there is no techno-fix or deus ex machina remotely scalable to the planetary crises we face. Emergency atmospheric geoengineering schemes won’t save us at this point. Can’t we just suck the 900 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere that we have spewed since the beginning of the industrial revolution? No. It bears repeating that the spiking Keeling curve is non-reversible on human timescales.

“We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at Scripps. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.” ~ May 8, 2024

The rate of ocean warming has nearly quadrupled since the late twentieth century, doubling since 1993. In the last twelve month, ocean heating has been on a tear, shattering records consistently. The world is currently undergoing the fourth global coral bleaching event on record, the second in the last decade, and the Great Barrier Reef is suffering its worst bleaching event in recorded history. This year’s hurricane season will likely be a record-breaker. The oceans are starting to release all that thermal energy we have been unceremoniously dumping into them. At one time, oceans seemed like an endless sink for the emissions from humanity’s nonstop consumption of fossil fuels, but that appears to be coming to an end. The world’s rivers are warming and losing oxygen even faster than the oceans. In contrast to those grim stats, humanity is set to consume more resources in the next 30 years as we have since the dawn of civilization. We have already consumed the future and are now, as they say, eating the seed corn.

We have breached tipping points and set in motion positive feedback loops that are accelerating non-linear ecological changes. Six of nine major planetary boundaries have been broken. Our unintended and haphazard experiment with complex Earth systems will unleash a Pandora’s box of deadly consequences. The current rate of CO2 change is unprecedented for the past 50,000 years. We have already passed the 1.5C warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement to prevent the irreversible and worsening effects of climate change. A recent study warns that as we add more and more CO2 to the atmosphere, its potency for warming is stronger at higher atmospheric concentrations than an equivalent increase at lower atmospheric concentrations. The polar regions are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet and have been undergoing fundamental changes to their ocean/ice system which will affect all life on Earth. An ice-free Arctic is just around the corner. In a warming world, pathogens will be looking for ways to exploit the fast-changing environment, potentially creating the next global pandemic for people or destroying our food supply. The tree line, as well as animals, are expanding northward as the climate heats up and the ice melts. Nearly a third of all tree species are now endangered by our radically changing environment. The clear blue waters of Alaskan rivers are turning orange and rusty brown by the heavy metals being released from melting permafrost. The oceans are also turning green due to the shift in phytoplankton population from warming waters.

The insurance industry, the backbone of the global economy, is beginning to buckle: “I believe we’re marching toward an uninsurable future.” As is typical of our modern-day society, the hypocritical insurance industry is heavily invested in fossil fuels while simultaneously warning about the looming destruction from climate change. Billion dollar disasters are increasing while the time between such disasters is decreasing. This continual rebuilding that needs to be done more often would be another doom-loop cycle for our crumbling civilization, considering the carbon emissions required in such repair and reconstruction. Compound extreme weather and climate events, combinations of two or more extremes (hazards) that occur concurrently or sequentially, are also increasing and expected to grow many fold over in the future. These compound weather events will inevitably create a perfect storm that will one day permanently destroy supply chains and economies by acting as a constant disruptor to stability. It would have the same effect as a monster cyclone, or hypercane, traveling the globe in perpetuity, waxing and waning in strength but never dying, and leaving a path of destruction wherever it roamed. A stable climate no longer exists to support the reconstruction of what once was. Walden Thoreau’s words seem very prescient today: “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” With corporations also gobbling up single-family homes to monopolize the real estate market in America, we can officially say that the American dream of owning a home is dead. George Carlin always said you had to be asleep to believe anything about the American Dream.

I have been hearing about the need to abandon fossil fuels since President Carter put solar panels on the White House 45 years ago. I am still waiting for the techno-optimists to explain to me how they will save us from this new age we have created, known as the Pyrocene or Age of Fire; rest in peace, Holocene. We could also call our modern-day clusterfuck the Plasticene or Age of Plastics. Scientists are finding the stuff in every nook and cranny of the planet, including Antarctic krill, men’s testicles, and throughout the human body. If you drive a vehicle, you are contributing to the primary source for microplastics in the environment, tires, which account for 78%. Just as they lied about their knowledge of the catastrophic effects from burning their fossil fuel products, so too did the oil and plastics industry lie about their greenwashing fraud called recycling.

I never get an adequate, rational answer to our conundrum, because there is none. ChatGPT provides no better insight than the techno-optimists. The problem of a planet overrun by humans will resolve itself in short order and be recorded in the geologic fossil record after we put a cherry on top of this fossil fuel orgy, flattening the planet into a glass parking lot with nuclear weapons. That is another part of human nature that we will never escape…warfare. We seem to be one twitch away from WWIII and the next Stone Age. In fact, there are nearly 200 armed conflicts raging around the world right now, the largest number in decades. This marked uptick in violence could be an ominous sign of a violent new era. From the 2023 Armed Conflict Survey:

“The accelerating climate crisis continues to act as a multiplier of both root causes of conflict and institutional weaknesses in fragile countries…”

We are on the verge of authoritarian rule as global conditions break down and people embrace centralized solutions. Xenophobia will grow and borders will be shut down, sources of food and energy will be fought over and secured, and rationing of resources will be enforced.

Illustration by Mark Bryan

After studying our ecological overshoot for several decades, I have some observations that must be accepted as fact:

• “Renewable” energy is not displacing our massive fossil fuel consumption at all, but only serving as a small addition to the total global energy consumption.

• “Renewable” or alternative energy, such as solar and wind, is dependent on fossil fuels for its manufacture, installation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.

•  The so-called “Energy Transition” away from fossil fuels is pure techno-hopium and will never materialize.

• The general public and many scientists don’t understand the math and physics involved in transitioning a $100 trillion global economy, dependent on hydrocarbons, to intermittent alternative energy sources.

• No such “Energy Transition” can be accomplished without radical reductions in resource consumption. This is antithetical to the basic biological urge for expansion by most organisms, including humans, and current trends illustrate this behavior. We also keep finding more ways to consume evermore energy. On top of this, the World Bank is urging faster economic growth for emerging economies in order for them to repay mounting debts.

• Governments are ill-equipped to deal with industrial civilization’s complex polycrisis because effective solutions would undermine economic growth.

The latest deadline to ‘save the planet’ is now two years from now, according to a UN Climate Change official. No doubt another arbitrary date given to justify someone’s job and department budget. According to Global Footprint Network’s calculations, humans have been in overshoot for over half a century. Others would say that we have been in overshoot since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, surviving only by mining the Earth’s soils. Like fossil fuels, the vast nutrient store of soils represents a unique one-time gift that has been squandered by agricultural erosion. Without petroleum and arable soils, the Earth will only support perhaps 5% of the present global population, as it did before the advent of agriculture. Considering that we are being constantly blindsided by faster-than-normal and worse-than-expected findings from scientists, I suspect there are far less food harvests left for us than we think. Hotter temperatures and pollution are hastening the destruction of topsoil. Our temporary extension of Earth’s carrying capacity for humans is coming to an end. Once Earth’s life support systems start to unravel, the grotesquely inflated human population will crash. In the meantime, “Memento moriturum; maxime faciunt vitae!”

The state of the planet is getting considerably worse. I feel like the 2030s will be the decade when the wheels start coming off this ride of industrial civilization. Until I speak to you all again, please enjoy those blue skies and store-bought food while they last. And remember, industrial civilization is a heat engine and it will suddenly break one day!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael Lee Longenecker.

Image by Craig Manners.

Blackened smoke in the background, the raging inferno ripped through tents long after Israel had bombed another designated “safe” zone for evacuated civilians from north of Gaza. A charred body, of a boy or a girl, pulled from the wreckage, still burning. It’s the “bigger shoah,” the bigger Holocaust, Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defense minister had promised Gaza in 2008.

In the same scene, three children helped their mother place their tattered floor mattresses on a cart. The middle-aged woman’s face was grooved like newly tilled rows of arid soil. The scrawny donkey hobbled in the sand, struggling to pull the cart. He appeared as hungry and thirsty as the gaunt children trying to climb on top of the mattresses.

The donkey seemed confused as the woman ordered him to move toward the central of Gaza. The poor animal was directed to the same location from which he had moved the family days earlier. Donkeys in Gaza have a better memory of the place than many Western leaders.

The load this time was lighter, perhaps due to the loss of a husband or child. The same family was on the move from one “safe” place to another Israeli-designated “safe” area. Like all the people of Gaza, families were ordered to move from the north and to evacuate the south to the middle of Gaza, even as the Israeli army bombs Al Mawasi, Nuseirat, and Bureij in the center of the Strip.

The four-legged creature trudged slowly. The TV camera focused on his expressive, glossy wide eyes. Even the donkey had realized what President Joe Biden has yet to recognize: there was no safe place in Gaza. Until then, I didn’t realize donkeys could have emotional reactions. I was mistaken; the famished donkey had more heart than Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Rishi Sunak, Justin Trudeau, and Olaf Scholz combined.

The donkey is not be the product of the “values” of Western civilization. He does not make a 2000-pound bomb and drops it over the most densely area on planet earth, such as Jabalia camp, nor does he possess the mental capacity to exploit Artificial Intelligence for more efficient mass assassination factory. Most importantly, the donkey does not understand the ingrained white Western racism toward non-white cultures.

American officials typically waste no time to condemn the killing of an Israeli, but are over cautious when addressing the murder of the less than equal human beings at the hand of Israel. In response to a question about the Israeli Shoah in Rafah, the U.S. State Department spokesperson Mathew Miller justified the burning of children telling the reporters that “Israel has a right to go after the Hamas … as appears to have been Israel’s aim here.”

At the White House, John Kirby took offense when CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Ed O’Keefe confronted him with, “How many more charred corpses does he have to see?” Kirby replied in part that Israel is investigating the attack, suggesting that it should be given time to complete its investigation before reaching any conclusion. The democratization of self-investigation is such a novel idea: allowing the criminal to investigate their own crimes. While we’re at it, the U.S. Department of Justice should consider allowing Donald Trump to investigate January 6 and see what he comes up with.

It is this American absurdity that emboldens Netanyahu’s belligerence, allowing him to ignore Biden and other Western leaders’ movable red line. Israeli tanks have reached the center of Rafah, forcing UNRWA and the World Central Kitchen (WKC) to cease food aid operations, and the charred bodies of Palestinian civilians are piling up. Yet, Israel has not crossed Biden’s line in the sand.

Israel has investigated previous murders, such as the killing of WCK aid workers, claiming that the killing was not intentional. Israeli army Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi declared it a “grave mistake.” Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu described the latest massacre in Rafah with similar lexicon, calling it a “tragic mishap.”

In explaining the large number of killed journalists, circa 140, an Israeli army spokesman stated that they “never . . . deliberately target journalists.”  Regarding the murder and injury of more than 100,000 Palestinian civilians, Israel claims they were unintended causality because it “takes all operationally feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians.”

In the last seven months, Israel has “mistakenly” murdered more than 225 humanitarian aid workers, “three times as many humanitarian aid workers killed in any single conflict recorded in a single year.” Additionally, over 700 of healthcare professionals lost their lives, and hundreds of hungry people were killed waiting for food aid trucks at Gaza roundabouts. In all these cases, Israel denied responsibility and blamed the victims for their death.

It is a clear case of cognitive dissonance when Western powers provide food aid to alleviate the Israeli-made famine, while supplying the means for Israel to perpetuate a starvation regime, and the bombs to burn (less than hungry) children alive. Gaza has become not just the tombs of famished children, but the graveyard of the values of Western Civilization.

The outcome of past Israeli investigation is evident in a boilerplate of mistakes despite the writ large evidence suggesting otherwise. Yet, if we take the Israeli assertions at face value and accept, they all were “mistakes,” it raises the question: how many mistakes can one make before they become either liars or certified as stupid? Or, are Western leaders who continue to believe these “Israeli mistakes,” the real fools?

The post Gaza: The Donkey and the Fate of Western Civilization appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jamal Kanj.

Alexander the Great attacking the Persian King Darius in the Battle of Issus, Nov. 5, 333 BCE. Pompeii mosaic. Naples National Archaeological Museum. Public Domain

Prologue

Alexander the Great accomplished so much so soon so young that he rightly earned the honor of heroic greatness. He was definitely a hero and a genius. His mother Olympias tried to convince him he was the son of Zeus. Alexander loved and trusted his mother. He probably assured himself he was the son of Zeus. His hero, Achilles, was the son of goddess Thetis.

But the young man loved Aristotle who tutored him in Greek history, politics, philosophy, and international affairs. In addition, Aristotle passed on to his pupil his enormous knowledge and respect for Homer, the teacher of the Greeks for millennia. He edited the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer for Alexander. He urged him to unite the Greeks and to eliminate the Persian danger. Alexander did both. He was inspired by Aristotle. The result was unprecedented in history. His general Ptolemaios / Ptolemy, who was also a student of Aristotle, became king of Egypt and materialized the dream of Aristotle. He built a Mouseion-university and the Library of Alexandria. He opened the doors of these great institutions to the best Greek minds. The enlightenment that emerged in Alexandria was astonishing. It made our world. Alexandria became the capital polis of civilization for several centuries in the Mediterranean. And that really was the legacy of Homer, Aristotle, and Alexander.

Alexander’s dream

The other dream of Alexander was to create a united ecumene, in effect a world society and government under the rule of reason and his hegemony. This interpretation of Alexander comes from a Greek living in the Roman Empire that had abolished Greek freedom, conquering Greece in 146 BCE and making it a province of Rome. Plutarch was that voice. He was a Greek philosopher, prolific writer, and a priest of Apollo. He lived from about the second half of the first century to the first twenty of so years of the second century of our times. He served Rome but remained Greek.

“Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers,” Plutarch said, “wrote and taught how to live in ideal cities but never translated their ideas into political reality. Alexander did. He conquered Asia, but his purpose was more than control and warfare. He dressed like the Asians did. He tried convincing his officers to marry Persian women. He married a princess from Afghanistan. He also established more than 70 Greek cities in Asia, all of them governed by justice and the rule of law, thus eliminating injustice in large regions of his empire. Plutarch argues correctly that the conquest of Alexander brought peace, justice, and civilization to Asia. It was by living as citizens of these cities that the bad and unacceptable were extinguished. The lives of the citizens improved by familiarity with better ways of living. Alexander succeeded in reforming the institutions of several nations. He certainly is a great philosopher…. Alexander believed that the gods sent him to unite the world and create one commonwealth of equality and justice and civilization.”^[1]

Alexander the Great, left, and Nike, goddess of victory, right, is crowning his victories. Gold stater, dated about 322 BCE. The gold stater came out of Sardes (Sardeis), key city of Lydia, which became a province of Persia. Alexander used Sardes for his mint. Courtesy Numismatic Museum, Athens.

Alexander was a revolutionary. In trying to reform his empire, adding, for instance, non-Greeks to Greek culture, he faced resistance from his Greek officers and the local elites in Asia. After all, for the first time in history a conqueror abandoned violence as a governing principle. Alexander wanted to convince the vast majority of the conquered people he was their friend. He joined Europe and Asia by marriages, similar clothing, and the equal administration of justice and by founding Greek cities all over Asia so Asians could see the difference.

After Alexander

Unfortunately, Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE. He was barely 33 years old. He and his successors ignored the rising power of Rome. This turned out to be a fatal error. Romans learned from the Greeks. But the wars among Alexander’s successors weakened them and gave the Romans a free hand in the West. They dismembered Macedonia and Greece and, by the end of the first century BCE, the main kingdoms of Alexander in Asia and Egypt were provinces of Rome. The Roman republic became Roman empire, a vast territory that included Alexander’s empire and Europe. Some of the Roman emperors were responsible leaders, but most of the remaining emperors were ruthless and corrupt. One of them, Constantine, dumped Greco-Roman religion and culture for a messianic and monotheistic religion, Christianity. Such a violent policy turned Greco-Roman civilization upside down. The Roman government and the church in the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, hired northern European barbarians to smash the Greek temples, burn libraries, and otherwise level the magnificent treasures the ancient Greeks had built. The great Alexandrian Library went up in flames in late fourth century. And in 415, Christian monks tore to pieces Hypatia, director of a philosophy school in Alexandria. Her crime was teaching Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy.

Hypatia, detail from School of Athens by Raphael, 1510. Hypatia, in white robes, is above philosopher Pythagoras, shown writing on a book, and, possibly, next to philosopher Parmenides. Common Domain

Egypt and Greece belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire after the fourth century had fallen to the hands of European barbarians. This political division exacerbated divisions within Christianity, which blossomed to a civilization Schism of 1054. The anathemas hurled by the Pope and the Patriarch and the Patriarch against the Pope, brought the crusades. These religious wars inflicted death and destruction in Christendom and against Islam. The fourth crusade of 1204, instead of going to Jerusalem to fight the Moslems, it turned its wrath against the Greeks. French, German, and Venetian troops captured Constantinople, thus inflicting a giant wound on the security of medieval Greece. The Western crusaders burned the libraries of Constantinople and behaved like barbarians. Their occupation of Constantinople lasted for 50 years, cementing a rising hatred between Christian East and Christian West. The crusaders also captured the rest of Medieval Greece, shredding the country with foreign oppression and culture.

Victorious religious warriors from Venice, France and Germany enter Constantinople in 1204. Painting by Eugene Delacroix, 1840. Public Domain

Mongol Turks took notice. They took advantage of the protracted Christian civil war. They kept attacking the Greeks. In 1453, they captured Medieval Greece, which also exposed the West to the Mongol Turkish menace.

Fall of Constantinople, May 29, 1453. Mural from the Cafe of G. Antikas, Skopelos. Picture is depicting the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos on a white horse ready for battle. Public Domain

Greece suffered enormously from the loss of its freedom. Its best scholars left the country for Italy. They were loaded with the surviving manuscripts of ancient Greece. These Greek books were translated into Latin and started the Renaissance and made our world. In 1821, the Greek Revolution brought into being an independent state. In 1828, the European powers, Russia, England, and France, appointed Ioannes Kapodistrias as the first President of Greece.

Hellas, a sacred country, and school for humanity

Ioannes Kapodistrias, detail of a portrait by Thomas Lawrence, 1818-1819. The portrait shows Kapodistrias while serving as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia. Public Domain

Kapodistrias, 1776-1831, was from the Greek island of Kerkyra in the Ionian Sea. He was educated in philosophy, law, and medicine at the University of Padua. He proved himself a genius in diplomacy. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was so impressed by Kapodistrias he made him Minister of Foreign Affairs. Kapodistrias served in that powerful post from 1816 to 1822. In 1822, he took a leave of absence and set up home in Geneva where he founded the Philomusse Society to raise funds for the Greek Revolution and expand the cause of European Philhellenism.

The rise to power of Kapodistrias disturbed the Chancellor of Austria Klemens von Metternich. He ordered Austrian diplomats and other senior officials to watch him. One of the senior military officers named Joseph Chervenka, interviewed people who knew Kapodistrias. Chervenka summarized the impressions of those who spoke to him about Kapodistrias. On February 13, 1816, he wrote a report and sent it to Metternich. Chervenka said to Metternich that Kapodistrias had quite an agenda for making modern Greece into Hellas. He said:

“Kapodistrias expected all European powers unanimously to agree in establishing an independent Hellas with inviolable borders. Hellas would be neutral, not allowing any foreign intervention or influence in the country. Her sole purpose would be to cultivate the sciences and enlightenment for the benefit of humanity. Hellas would send teachers, artists, and laws to all countries. The rulers of those countries would be educated in Hellas. And in concert with their Greek teachers, they would be able to rule their people with fairness and justice in the spirit of Hellenic civilization. The geographical position of Hellas between East and West would help her to maintain a balance of security and peace. Kapodistrias also insisted that humanity would declare Hellas a sacred country.”^[2] (emphasis mine)

There are differences in the visions of Alexander and Kapodistrias. These two Greeks dreamt about the power of Hellas in relation to the rest of the world. One of the two, Alexander, had the power of the greatest king and emperor. His word was law. He created the largest empire the world has ever seen. He tried and to some degree succeeded to Hellenize the world, or at least, he put the first stone for an edifice of reason and civilization in a planetary governance. His premature death, however, undermined his original idea for a better world.

Similar misfortune struck Kapodistrias. In 1828, he took over a tiny, impoverished state threatened by Turkey and barely tolerated by the “great” European powers: England, Russia, and France. England was hostile to the new state of Greece. It never wished to see an independent Greece. England occupied the Greek Ionian islands and had strategic ambitions for capturing Cyprus, then occupied by Turkey. Moreover, England kept in its national museum looted Parthenon treasures. England could barely stand the ambitious policies of Kapodistrias to create the foundations of an independent Greek state. Here was a well-educated Greek who had served as Russia’s chief diplomat. But even before Kapodistrias was appointed to be the foreign minister of Russia, he had created an independent and neutral Switzerland and had prevented the division of France after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

Kapodistrias Road in Geneva. Sign is thanking Kapodistrias: “Diplomat and politician, defender of the interests of Geneva and Switzerland at the Congress of Vienna [in 1815].” Wikipedia

The model of Hellas

The efforts of Alexander the Great and the first President of modern Greece Ioannes Kapodistrias to employ Hellenic civilization for the good of humanity reflect the greatness of ancient Greece / Hellas. Greece had the good fortune of becoming the lighthouse of the world. For several centuries it gave birth to science and civilization of unprecedented beauty, reason, justice, and virtue. This good fortune came into being in the works of the epic poets Apollonios Rhodios, Homer and Hesiod; the tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; historians Herodotos and Thucydides, the comic poet Aristophanes; philosophers / scientists who probed the heavens to such detail, that one of them, Democritus in the fifth century BCE, discovered the Atomic Theory and another, Aristarchos of Samos, in the third century BCE, proposed the Heliocentric Theory of the universe. Euclid in late fourth century BCE and Archimedes in the third century BCE pretty much created mathematics. Archimedes also advanced mathematical physics and engineering. Still yet another scientist, Hipparchos, set the foundations of mathematical astronomy in the second century BCE in Rhodes. He also left his fingertips all over the Antikythera Mechanism, an immaculate geared bronze computer of genius, the progenitor of our computers.

Main fragments (A-G) of the Antikythera Mechanism. Imaged by: PTM (Polynomial Texture Mapping). Fragments seen from both sides. Fragment A incorporates 27 of the 30 surviving toothed gears. X-rays of the front of Fragment A show the Cosmos with Sun at its center. The back reveal an upper spiral of a 19-year Metonic calendar and a lower spiral of an 18-year Saros predictive dial. The Antikythera Mechanism predicts the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon. Courtesy Tom Malzbender and Hewlett Packard.

Add to this extraordinary galaxy of intelligence and foresight, Aristotle, tutor of Alexander the Great and inventor of the science of zoology in the fourth century BCE, and you have lasting science and civilization power.

The Greeks lived in poleis (city-states) all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, “like ants or frogs in the sea and around a pond,” according to Plato.^[3] To make polis living enjoyable and tolerable and to protect themselves from each other and enemies, the Greeks invented political theory, democracy, jury courts, and laws published on acres of stone and marble for all to see and read. They built magnificent temples in honoring their anthropomorphic gods. They sculpted bronze and marble statues of the gods and handsome nude heroes, athletes, and dressed or naked women.

Reproductions of statues. Aphrodite of Melos, left. Kore (young woman) from the Acropolis, and Aphrodite of Knidos (Phryne) by Praxiteles. Painting by Evi Sarantea.

Greeks also shared the virtues of individuality, courage, the rule of law and justice, often democracy, science, technology, beautiful architecture and arts and crafts, theater, Panhellenic games, and festivals like the Olympics. And despite their conflicts, they created an admirable science-based civilization that became Western civilization.

Without Hellas: Climate chaos

However, the United States, Europe, and several other countries of the world have neglected most of the virtues they inherited from the Greeks (democracy, equality, rule of law, science for the public good and the discovery of truth, and love of the natural world). The result is awful. They are poisoning and damaging the planet and its ecosystems. The worst result of such carelessness and hubris is climate change. It threatens civilization, humanity, and the planet. The main conclusion of the US Fifth National Climate Assessment, Nov. 14, 2024, warns:

“The global warming observed over the industrial era is unequivocally caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂)—the primary greenhouse gas produced by human activities—and other greenhouse gases continue to rise due to ongoing global emissions. Stopping global warming would require both reducing emissions of CO₂ to net zero and rapid and deep reductions in other greenhouse gases. Net-zero CO₂ emissions means that CO₂ emissions decline to zero.”

Edward Munch, The Scream, 1893. National Gallery of Norway. Prophetic icon of the plight of humanity from human abuse of nature, in this instance from rising planetary temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. Public Domain.

But the most startling and devastating conclusion of the Fifth National Climate Assessment is that the US is beyond the charts. Its obsession with petroleum and petroleum-powered machines (cars, trucks, busses, ships, yachts, airplanes, leaf blowers, military fleets of airplanes and navies) have made the country extremely vulnerable to private greed, and to the forces of nature. Ceaseless dumping in the atmosphere of unfathomable amounts of planet-warming gases are threatening the country with thermal death. “The things Americans value most are at risk,” says the Fifth National Climate Assessment. “More intense extreme events and long-term climate changes make it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families, reliable public services, a sustainable economy, thriving ecosystems and strong communities… The United States has warmed 68 percent faster than Earth as a whole over the past 50 years.”

Without Hellas: Triumph of nukes

In addition, the United States and a few other countries possess nuclear weapons, the ultimate means of extinction. The intentional or accidental explosion of a single nuclear bomb is certain to cause dramatic and planetary damage and death. Nuclear war is unthinkable. It will destroy humanity, civilization, and the planet. It’s necessary, therefore, to abolish these evil weapons and find an alternative to the dangerous system of state and international governance.

Could Hellas become a school for humanity?

Neither Alexander the Great nor President Kapodistrias could have foreseen the moral abyss of the modern world. The idea of Hellas is still relevant to forestall the resurrection of dark age, or to slow down its spread all over the planet. Kapodistrias knew his age of official slavery, European colonization of the tropics, and monarchies was destined to continue warfare as the only means of resolving conflicts and protecting the selfish interests of the landed oligarchy and governing classes. He thought that ancient Hellas in modern times could become the school for humanity. This thought was uppermost in his mind but did not have the opportunity to translate it into a formal proposal and policy. When he had enormous power, he hoped that Russia, England, and France would bless that idea by securing the territorial integrity and independence of resurrected Hellas. This country would do nothing else but cultivate the sciences for the enlightenment of humanity.

Kapodistrias’ proposal merits support and testing. Would a resurrected Hellas devoted to virtuous activities for the benefit of humanity make a difference? Could this Hellenic polis become the paradigm for for the future of humanity and the planet? I would answer both questions in the affirmative. If some ancient Greek books could trigger the Renaissance among the Arabs in the 8^th century and among the Europeans in the 15^th century, imagine what a country devoted to enlightenment and the public and environmental good could accomplish. The challenges are two. Convince the large powers of our time, the third decade of the 21^st century (the United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union), to embrace such a new idea and give it a try. This would demand the end of war in Ukraine. The fire of Greek knowledge created the world. It can do it again. The countries of the European Union, the United States, and Russia own their existence to Hellenic civilization.

Second, modern Greece must become Hellas, that is to say, return to its ancient virtues of polytheism, democracy, science, naked Olympics, and political independence guaranteed by the world’s great powers, which will declare the country to be sacred Hellas. The prophetic visions of Alexander the Great and Kapodistrias have enormous attraction and power. The new sacred Hellas can indeed become the school for the planet. With many of its temples restored and schools open for the cultivation of science and enlightenment for humanity, it has a real opportunity to guide humans back to the right path of living in peace and harmony with each other and our Mother Earth.

NOTES

1. Plutarch, On the Fortune of Alexander, Discourse 1, 5-8. ↑

2. Polychrones K. Enepekides, ed., Regas-Hypsilantes-Kapodistrias (Athens: Estia, 1965), 196 (in Greek). ↑

3. Plato, Phaedo 109b. ↑

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Το Σπίτι, House, 1996. Painting by Evi Sarantea. It mirrors the elimination of society by climate chaos and wars. The surviving house is but the roof and door and windows and a couple of children hiding on the door.

Prologue

The year 2023 was the hottest in the past 100,000 years. Human activities in industrialized agriculture, deforestation, and hunting of wild animals in Europe and America also became the norm in the tropics. The results are all bad. Raptor birds of prey in Africa have been forced to extinction. Tropical forests in Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia have been converted to industrial farms and logging factories. The tragedy of this massive deforestation is that it eliminates trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, perhaps the most destructive of greenhouse gases warming the planet.

No more subsidies to climate change

Yet fossil fuels business as usual is booming. The International Monetary Fund reported that, In 2022, countries subsidized them at the tune of $ 7 trillion. India is dramatically increasing its coal extraction and use. Norway is allowing the mining of its seas for metals useful for the batteries of electric cars.

The United Nations allowed a petroleum kingdom, United Arab Emirates, to preside over the Climate Summit of December 2023. Fossil fuel lobbyists invaded Dubai, numbering 2,456. The predictable result was a victory of fossil fuel companies. They will continue funding professors to manufacture doubt about the science of climate change. In addition, they are spending lots of money trying to convince the younger generation to keep driving gas guzzlers and deny global warming.

The coming class war

The year 2024 opens with a triumphant billionaire class acting like an independent state, even having its own missiles. But one wonders if these very wealthy people ever think about their future in a wrecked planet, basically their doing. There’s no Earth B. And the thought must have crossed their Artificial Intelligence brain that the many powerless are bound to react to the bad news. That billionaires made certain that nothing happened to slay the climate dragon in the room. The many will also find out that big oil, coal, and natural gas designed humanity’s helpless pretense of fighting global warming / climate change.

The drama becomes complicated. The country is punished by a “mixed bag of unsettled weather.” Winter pretends to exist. In the first 11 days of January 2024, nights in southern California turned cold, very cold. Heavy snow is covering the Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains. In my small town of Claremont, the Sun would offer relief and I would bike for half-an-hour or so. Walking the streets of Claremont added pleasure, save for the sporadic violent sounds of leaf-blowers.

What happened to climate change?

But climate change disappeared from public discourse. On October 10, 2023, I gave a talk to the Claremont University Club. I spoke to them about the history and effects of climate chaos. My slides depicted the dramatic rise of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, CO_2. These gases grasp chunks of solar energy and don’t release them to space. Slowly and in the past century or so these extra amounts of energy increase the normal temperature from solar radiation. Higher temperatures cause higher precipitation that come down as rains, some of which fall rapidly with the potential of floods. Other consequences of higher temperatures include forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves on land and seas, politicized climate summits, young people protesting the uncertain and dangerous future they are inheriting from their blah, blah elders. I even mentioned the complete indifference of the Claremont City Council to climate change. A couple of people asked questions. One man talked to me after the presentation.

American politics

So, if the horror and destruction and heat of climate change leaves Americans cold, what are they excited about? The Republicans in Congress refuse to cooperate with their Democratic colleagues. Republican Congressmen / women are trying to impeach President Biden in order to get even with the House impeachment of former president Trump. Meanwhile, droves of Republican evangelicals in Iowa want Trump to be the next president. Some of them say Trump exemplifies Jesus. Others – Christian Zionists — may look at Trump in order to trigger the second coming of Jesus. And Trump encourages this insane behavior as fitting politics in America in 2024.

Wars boost barbarism and climate chaos

Another insane crusade of global dimensions is America’s funding of World War III-like war in Ukraine, pitting America’s NATO underlings against nuclear weapons armed Russia. The second war funded and armed by America is the mayhem and vast ecocide between Jews and Moslem and Christian Palestinians in Palestine Gaza. “The violence inflicted on Palestinians by an Israel [supported] by President Biden and his foreign policy team,” says Joshua Frank, “is unlike anything we had previously witnessed in more or less real-time in the media and on social media. Gaza, its people, and the lands that have sustained them for centuries are being desecrated and transformed into an all too unlivable hellscape, the impact of which will be felt — it’s a guarantee — for generations to come.”

An armada of America is serving the relentless Israeli bombing of largely civilians in the Gaza strip. The American embrace of Israel has contained the war, but, sooner or later, that atrocity and war crime will engulf the rest of the Middle East. These two wars together have probably doubled the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

These international cow-boy wars are signals and symptoms of irresponsibility and anarchy. They are forcing me to think in unconventional ways. Could it be we have exhausted and corrupted the political theory behind democracy and civilization? Even the integrity of independent states? We see that warfare and global warming are shredding the foundations of civilization. Only a pretense of a roof is remaining over humanity. Are we resurrecting the centuries-long instability and chaos and plunder of the Roman Empire?

But the heart of the matter is the supremacy of the private over the public interest. We don’t seem to be able to escape the barbaric notion that power makes right. This flaw is fundamentally responsible for the cosmic tragedy of global warming. Like a giant cloud, the fossil fuel oligarchy covers the sky of reason and desire for survival. The citizens of America, Europe, China, India, and Africa know practically nothing about each other. They (in America and Europe) calculate they don’t want to buy solar panels for their homes, for example, because the others (in China, India, and Africa) won’t. Besides, the very wealthy care only about themselves in their own countries. For example, the Republican candidates for president promise to eliminate any measures and policies fighting climate change. Their agenda is simple – drill, baby drill. Their politics is to give more power to fossil fuels billionaires. They say let China and India fight climate change. This selfishness brings discord and war.

Imperial temptation

Add to this the widely shared distrust from centuries of religious hatred, the imperial temptation of fossil fuel companies and billionaires is probably scheming to take over the world. Such a coup will likely trigger class conflict and more global war with unforeseeable catastrophic climate and political consequences.

The real mechanism for global consensus about fighting climate change was the annual Climate Summit. But even that process has been purchased by fossil fuel companies. Climatologists working for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issue annual reports that highlight the dangers of ceaseless emissions of greenhouse gases. These gases come from millions of animal farms and huge industrialized farming; billions of cars and trucks; millions of yachts and private airplanes; countless large commercial airplanes and ships; billions of homes heated by the burning of natural gas; factories producing electricity and fertilizers and pesticides and cement. Add wars to these colossal uses of fossil fuels, and you have Dante’s inferno.

Building our own future

The only way out of this extraordinary dilemma is the rapid education and action by the public. Environmentalists must join hands and explain climate change and what has to be done to the voters. Ask them to set aside their private religious ideas and focus on their survival and the survival of our Mother Earth. Phasing out fossil fuels is the only option right now. And working together for the next several years would suffice to build the alternative and livable energy infrastructure from solar energy and wind. An enormous benefit of this cooperation would be the rebuilding of both civilization and democratic society.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

I’m talking about the assembly line debasement of the individual that defines the compulsory school system. I’m talking about the widespread objectification of young people at every level of a radically expanding mass media panopticon that allows them to be bought, sold, and commodified like trading cards. And yes, I am talking about the rampant physical and sexual abuse of minors because this is precisely what this kind of culture leads to. And what this culture leads to is trauma on a massive scale, entire generations of mass shooters, terrorists, war criminals, party line voters and good citizens just following orders.

The effects that trauma has on children has been well recorded and those effects have been shown to carry on deep into adulthood. According to the National Institute of Justice, child abuse and neglect has been consistently shown to increase the risk of later forms of antisocial behavior, including violence perpetration and crime. Some studies have shown that child maltreatment can roughly double the probability of an individual engaging in this type of behavior, so it’s hardly shocking that a civilization built on the degradation of individual autonomy from infancy would produce an increasingly antisocial society, one that casually engages in or fails to prevent acts of mass savagery on a daily basis.

I can think of no better example of this kind of depravity than the modern warfare industry that we all seem disturbingly content to tolerate with a shrug and a sigh, and I can think of no example of that evil in action more visceral than Israel’s American facilitated war on children being carried out as we speak in the Gaza Strip.

It needs to be understood that this war did not begin on October 6. That horrific act of barbarism was merely the latest outburst of blowback to be produced by the 141 square mile child abuse factory that the western world has erected on the Dead Sea over the last half century. 60% of Gazans were already displaced before their latest war with 1.7 million people out of a population of 2.3 million residing in tightly packed refugee camps.

This hostile environment was reduced to a living death camp with the beginning of Israel’s 16-year blockade in 2006, which effectively cut off one of the most densely populated places on earth from the outside world by land, air and sea. Even before October, 64% of all households in Gaza were dangerously food insecure and 95% of all households lacked access to safe drinking water. Unemployment hovered at just over 45%, poverty was the norm, and thanks to the IDF, so was terrorism.

Israel has launched four major military assaults on the captive Gaza strip over the last 15 years, killing more than 4,000 people and leaving the rest shellshocked under a constant state of siege. This doesn’t even include the trauma caused by the near daily acts of abuse and humiliation suffered by the Palestinian people at the hands of the Zionist state during what passes for peace time. This includes the frequent kidnapping and incarceration of their children.

Israel is the only nation on earth that systematically prosecutes minors in military courts. Kids as young as 12-years-old are routinely taken from their beds in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers. They are blindfolded, bound and shackled; interrogated without any lawyer or guardian present and coerced, often with violence, to sign confessions in a language they can’t speak or read. The most common charge is throwing stones which can carry a sentence of twenty years. The prisons these children are then sent to are dens of physical, psychological and sexual abuse with UNICEF concluding ill-treatment in the Israeli Military Detention System to be “widespread, systematic and institutionalized throughout the process.” Over 1 million Palestinians have endured this hell since 1967.

The effects of this traumatic existence on the people of Gaza have been devastating with its children facing the brunt of the abuse. 65% of Gaza’s population is under 24 with the median age being 18. That is an entire generation raised under a 16-year campaign of state facilitated terrorism. Long before the current bloodbath drowning the Gaza Strip, study after study showed crippling rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among this youth with some estimates putting the rate of suffering to be as high as 70%. UNICEF found that one in three children in Gaza was in need of care for conflict related trauma and after interviewing 500 children and 160 parents, Save the Children found that 80% of these children showed symptoms of severe emotional distress with half contemplating suicide and 3 out of 5 engaging in self-harm.

I don’t think that I am being hyperbolic when I predict that every one of those already grisly statistics will likely reach 100% before the end of the year if they haven’t already. Over 20,000 people have been slaughtered in the last two months. Nearly 8,000 of them have been children. Another 52,000 Gazans have been wounded including over 1,000 kids who have lost at least one limb. 85% of this population is now homeless with hundreds of thousands being pushed into so-called “Safe Zones” on the Egyptian border; desolate tent cities with no water, no food and no bathrooms, and with rates of malnutrition and infectious disease reaching downright catastrophic heights, death by safe zone may very well come to surpass the body count produced by American ordinances.

The excuse used to justify this holocaust is that a gang of fucked up kids broke out of their concentration camp to seek revenge against anyone they could find walking free outside of its walls. But just where do you think they learned to do that? Where do you think the young men of Hamas learned how to shoot children and raid family homes? They learned it because they lived it, and they did it because it wouldn’t stop.

The actions committed on October 6 were despicable and indefensible, but they were also inevitable and if any child survives the latest Nakba in Gaza, they will only continue, with or without Hamas. Israel knows this and this is why they have committed themselves to finishing the job once and for all. The IDF’s solution to another generation of children traumatized by their reign of terror is to murder every last one of them and this horrific final solution is very possible thanks to American tax dollars and another generation of westerners numb to injustice after years of being groomed for blind obedience by big government and big tech.

This needs to stop and we in the west are the ones who need to stop it. A ceasefire isn’t enough. Israel plays the victim like a psychotic parent with Munchausen’s-by-proxy, but it is Palestine that will never know peace until that state and any other like it is smashed to smithereens. To ask anything less would be to ask a violated child to grow up in the same household as their rapist. The children of Palestine desperately need to heal, and traumatized children cannot heal in the shadow of their abusers.

I know this because I’ve lived it. I continue to live it every single day. I haven’t suffered a fraction of the trauma experienced by the children of Palestine, but I do know what it’s like to be preyed on as a child by powerful people only to have to coexist with their authoritarian institutions as an adult. Every week I drive by the preschool where they put their hands on my body, the grade school next door where they taught me that it was all my fault because I couldn’t perform the gender identity assigned to me, and the Catholic Church that oversaw it all.

I have to watch children coming in and out of those buildings and ask myself which one of them will join me in hell. It takes every fiber in my being just to keep driving long enough so I can park my car and scream. I want to kill the people who did this to me. I want to kill the people who will do it again. I want to burn those buildings to the ground. I want to do horrible things to make that broken little girl inside me feel safe. And I don’t want to do these things because I’m sick or indoctrinated by radical extremism. I want these things because that child they tried to strangle is still in there and she has every right to revenge, and so do the children of Gaza.

The only reason that I am any less lethal than the lost boys of Hamas is that I have this blog and the jihad that defines it. I could kill a thousand priests with my bare hands, and it wouldn’t make me feel any safer. It would only make it easier for the priests of this world to convince their sheep that Queer kids like me are wolves that need to be slaughtered. Revenge isn’t enough. The systems designed to debase the children of this world, from the Vatican to the Knesset, do not deserve to get off that easy.

We, the adults broken by a society with no use for the individuals that we were born to be, need to remember that we were children once too and we need to stand in solidarity with the children of Gaza and show them that you do not need to destroy yourself to fight back. Together, we must struggle to dismantle every institution that relies on the suffering of children to thrive and yes that means destroying the Zionist state of Israel, the American Empire and the church of the Westphalian nation state that oversees it all.

This is all I want for Christmas this year because only from the ashes of kingdoms can broken children become whole again. This is my jihad and I hope that you will join me and make it yours as well.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

What drives human society to engage in such reckless behavior? The answer to this question is at once familiar to any student of human nature, human society and human history, and yet equally perplexing given the prospect of potential obliteration. This article is an exploration of such causes and their consequences, with possible implications that go far beyond human behavior alone, and may be grounded in universal principles.

We live in extraordinary times – possibly more extraordinary than we realize. How many of those living even fifty years ago imagined that today we might be able to carry in the palm of our hand a device that can access most of human knowledge. Or quantum computers with almost infinite and instantaneous computing capacity, which are now being designed. We can now even peer at the birth of the universe.

We owe this to human intelligence, which is sometimes ridiculed, but is an extraordinary evolutionary development nonetheless. More specifically, we owe our superpowers to human technology, which is a product of human intelligence, and which further expands the production of human intelligence with new tools, even including the ability to augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

How did this come about? The answer is quite simple and well known, although only the most imaginative science fiction writers have even scratched the surface of its potential consequences. Intelligence is born of evolution.

Evolution, in turn, is born of competition, and more specifically the competition between life forms. In fact, if there is another form of competition, such as between astronomical or chemical or physical units, they might have to be defined as life forms by virtue of that competition. Even the most ancient and primitive life forms, such as viruses, compete against other life forms and against each other. This is the fundamental fact of evolution.

We know that evolution has produced a fantastic array of life forms on earth, and we can imagine that the array is infinitely greater when life forms in the rest of the universe are eventually included. We also know that life forms have lived and died and gone extinct and passed on their genes according to their ability to compete and survive in different environments and in response to other life forms, and to great catastrophes, as well, such as the Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals 65 million years ago.

What are the strategies that organisms have employed in the competition for survival? There are many that we all can name: size, speed, venom, diet, teeth, claws, regeneration of tissue, immunity to disease, etc. These can also be called tools or weapons, though not in the technological sense. The term weapon is nonetheless appropriate because it confers advantages in the competition against other organisms, eventually resulting in the survival or extinction of some over others, depending on the success or failure of the weapon.

But there is a special weapon that is implied by the term strategy itself, namely intelligence. Intelligence is present in all living things. Even a virus has a form of intelligence and responds to its environment. Plants and fungi have also shown this ability, including a means of communication. Intelligence therefore qualifies as a tool or weapon in the tool chest or arsenal of every organism.

It is not surprising, therefore, that evolution should experiment with intelligence in much the same way as with teeth, claws, horns, plumage and other traits. The antlers of the Irish elk, the diving adaptations of the sperm whale, the size of the Beast of Baluchistan, the plumage of birds of paradise, the predations of the strangler fig and carnivorous plants are all examples of evolutionary experiments that have gone to extremes. Some organisms, like the nautilus, have survived relatively unchanged for vast eons, while others have painted themselves into evolutionary corners that have resulted in extinction. The development of humans, therefore, demonstrates that evolution is also capable of taking intelligence to extremes.

It has often been noted that humans are relatively helpless creatures, except for their brains. Furthermore, those brains place a great demand upon the body’s metabolism, the female birth canal, the rearing requirements of the young, the number of offspring, etc. Nevertheless, our brain confers enough of an advantage to overcome these disadvantages, at least thus far in our evolution.

This has been true in the last few million years of our existence, and especially in the last ten thousand. Today, human technology has carried us off the charts as a species. It began in the paleolithic period, so called because stone tools are the only ones that survive in the archaeological record from this earliest and most basic stage of technological development. From then on, the human species has continued to evolve physically, eventually resulting in the homo sapiens species. But our technological evolution proceeded and accelerated even faster. In fact, our species essentially invented technological evolution, at least within our corner of the universe, and it is now proceeding at breakneck speed.

The reasons for the acceleration of technological advancement have been widely discussed elsewhere, and may be summarized as 1) population growth (the increase in the number of minds that can be applied to technological advancement), 2) the increase in available time at the disposal of those minds, and 3) the multiplying effect of technological advances, i.e. the use of existing technology to create new technology, at an ever increasing and perhaps geometric pace.

Why is technology so attractive to us? Most of the reasons are self-evident. It has the potential (though not always the effect) to make our lives easier, more comfortable and more secure. These are motives that drive all life forms, not just humans. It also gives us competitive advantages, both against other species (now a lesser issue), and within our own.

In fact, the competition within our own species has become the primary evolutionary drive for humans. This sometimes takes relatively benign forms, such as social achievement and recognition, but the most intense competition is what we call warfare. Not surprisingly, it is also the time of greatest and fastest technological advancement, due to the much greater investment in the development of new weaponry during times of conflict. As noted earlier, we are now proceeding into unknown territory, powered by our ancient competitive drive, our relatively recent brain capacity, and our seemingly self-propelled technology.

Are we the only life forms in the universe to experience these developments? Many well-known thinkers agree that this is extremely unlikely. Although the proportion of planets capable of developing and sustaining life is undoubtedly a small fraction of the total, and although the number that have developed intelligent life and technological societies is smaller still, the total number of planets is so enormous that intelligent life cannot be unique on a cosmic scale. Furthermore, some or many such planets will have reached an evolutionary stage comparable to our present millions or billions of years before us.

Why, then, is there no incontrovertible evidence of alien societies having come to our planet? Why is there no synthetic substance of clearly alien origin that we can point to? We have sent synthetic terrestrial substances to the moon, Mars and other planets despite our short history of space travel, so why would alien civilizations not do the same?

This is sometimes called the Fermi paradox, after a famous question posed by Enrico Fermi in a conversation with other physicists in 1950. Many thinkers have proposed explanations, but I would like to approach it from first principles rather than responses to the question, per se.

I propose that just as physical laws govern the entire universe, there are evolutionary and biological laws that also apply universally, not merely on earth. A good candidate for one such law is clearly evolution, and the competitive forces that drive it. It is, in fact, hard to imagine that competition between species and among the same species is not one of these universal laws. A species without such a drive would simply not bother to attempt to survive, and therefore disappear in short order (or, more likely, never come into being).

It is also reasonable to assume that, sooner or later, intelligence inevitably becomes one of the experimental paths of evolution. As on earth, it becomes the impetus for technological development, and also more rapid in times of warfare than at other times, in pursuit of an advantage against competitors.

This is a clue that we can use to help answer the question of why alien civilizations would not have visited earth, and why we are unlikely to visit theirs. It is also the reason for the title of this article. In order to explore this line of inquiry, it is instructive to look at the history of weapons development, already mentioned in passing.

Weapons are often cited as a metric for technological advancement. They may have other uses, but it is their use in warfare that often stands out in the creation of empire and domination of competing societies. Such may have been the case with fire and stone implements, although we often have only inferential evidence for prehistorical periods. Clearer evidence comes for the taming of the horse and other domesticated creatures, and from metallurgy and then gunpowder. Shipbuilding, external and internal combustion engines, chemistry, electricity and the other developments of the industrial revolution eventually also contributed to advances in weaponry and warfare.

Since 1900, we have experienced poison gas, aircraft, hypersonic missiles, electronic weapons, artificial intelligence, and of course, nuclear weapons. We know that poison gas (“chemical weapons”) has been banned by international treaty, and that no one has used nuclear weapons in warfare since 1945. But poison gas has been used despite the ban, and nuclear weapons still exist in great quantities, with delivery systems capable of destroying most or all of humanity. It is a Sword of Damocles over the human race, with other swords under development. Some suspect that biological weapons have also been tried.

Will we succeed in avoiding our own destruction? For how long? Will no one in the next 10 years trigger a nuclear war? The next 100? 1000? 10,000? No one at all? Has there ever been a weapon that has not been used? In the case of nuclear weapons, a single war between nuclear powers might be enough to finish us off. Will the US/NATO use a nuclear weapon when it runs out of conventional weapons, to prevent a defeat in Ukraine? In eastern Asia? Will Russia be driven to use if nuclear weapons in order to avoid disappearance as a nation?

Most of us know the story of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion asks the frog to carry him across the river. “No way!” says the frog. “You’ll kill me with your stinger!”

“Why would I do that?” asks the scorpion. “I can’t swim.”

So the frog takes him halfway across, when the scorpion mortally stings him.

“Why did you do that?” asks the dying frog,

“I’m a scorpion,” says the scorpion. “It’s in my nature.”

And what is the nature of humans? Has there ever been a time without war? Many of us will acknowledge that we came close to nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Reportedly, there were scorpions in both Washington and Moscow. Washington’s chief scorpion was Gen. Curtis Lemay, the Air Force Chief of Staff. He is reported to have considered a nuclear war “winnable” and worth the risk, and he even permitted some of his bombers to stray beyond the callback point despite lacking the authority. Khrushchev made reference to similar pressures on his side (a negotiating bluff, perhaps, but certainly plausible).

Are there scorpions in Washington today? Some policy makers are certainly tempting fate, principally the neoconservative warmongers. They bear major responsibility for pulling the U.S. out of nuclear arms reduction and limitation treaties, including the manufacture and testing of low-yield “battlefield” nuclear weapons that both sides previously refrained from developing, for fear that the temptation to use them would be too great if they found themselves losing a conventional war, as in Ukraine. This sort of nuclear brinkmanship is exactly the sort of folly that can lead to masses of dead scorpions and frogs.

The question therefore arises: is nuclear holocaust even avoidable (permanently, that is)? Or a holocaust by biological or other means, such as a takeover by artificial intelligence? Or other technology that we haven’t even thought of yet? If not, does it explain why we have no evidence of visitation by alien civilizations? Are we hitting a barrier to further evolution that is universal in scope, and which sooner or later results in a lifeless burnt-out planet, or one with only primitive life forms, or perhaps a small number of intelligent survivors, doomed to rise again, bump against the ceiling of evolutionary development and get thrown back in an endless cycle?

I am not the first to make this case, but I believe that it is unfortunately very timely, and I hope it stimulates new thoughts for consideration.  I also hope that I am wrong, that there is something that I am overlooking, and that we can find a way to overcome this aspect of our nature and build a more peaceful – or at least less warlike – society that has eluded us for as long as we have existed.  But the evidence is not encouraging, and I would feel a lot better if an alien civilization came calling soon, proving that self-destruction is not the inevitable end of evolution and technology.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.

Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:

Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war… Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen.

Now I don’t know if the events catalyzed by Prigozhin’s attempted coup are part of a ‘game within a game’ designed to flush out fifth columnists while providing a headfake to western strategists… OR if this was an authentic coup. But what I do know is that there are historical processes at play which too few recognize and which President Putin understands very well.

Some might think Putin’s comparison to the 1917 revolution to be hyperbole, or a disrespect for the glorious Soviet revolution. They would be mistaken.

Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation

The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.

Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner — head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.

These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.

One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado, William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:

The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.

Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:

It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives – the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens – can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this [p. 35].

The American System Goes Global

Gilpin was not alone in this vision.  In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury, and corruption, which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally, was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.

In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.

As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.

The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialization and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the West (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’ — the emission of productive credit from state banks.

It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian Railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.

The British Empire, which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping, was not amused.

By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping, and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads, and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.

The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.

The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud

In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the Meiji Palace in 1907.

After crippling the Russian state and military (its navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”

American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan, played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in The New York Times celebrating the revolution read:

Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.

The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…

“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.”

Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:

May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!

Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:

Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.

Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch, who experienced the events of 1917, firsthand wrote:

In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.  [1]

According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines. [2]

It is also noteworthy that after Trotsky was arrested by Canadian authorities while en route back to Russia with tens of thousands of dollars of Wall Street money, it was none other than Claude Dansey (Cecil Rhodes disciple, deputy chief of the new MI6 and founder of US military intelligence in 1917!!) that directly intervened to liberate Trotsky and company.

Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery

Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc., always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.

As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies, and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone, however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work. [3] One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.

For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.

Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish, saying:

he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.

Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.

Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.Upon taking charge of the Russian economy, Trotsky and Lenin unleashed a destructive wave of economic reforms titled ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP) that saw vast liberalization of the entire state with western corporate powers sweeping in to buy up former national utilities for pennies on the dollar. The most powerful figure of the western magnates to be granted full access to buy up Russia under this new policy was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer (1898-1990) who was only forced to leave Russia the moment Trotsky was kicked out (and returning to dominance in the weeks after Stalin’s 1953 death).

Later on in life, Hammer described how Lenin told him: ”We do not need doctors, we need businessmen… communism is not working and we must change to a New Economic Policy.”

Working closely with Lenin and especially Trotsky, Hammer became the principal moderator of nearly every business deal made between the Soviet government and western corporations during the 1920s which saw Russia sink into brutal economic enslavement to foreign powers at a pace which would not be seen again for over 60 years.

The vast liberalization of the Russian economy during the dark 1920s paralleled closely the Perestroika program of free trade/privatization of the 1990s and it is no coincidence that George Bush Sr dubbed this program of Balkanized looting of Russia ‘Operation Hammer’.

If one saw a proto-George Soros in the figure of Armand Hammer, they would not be far off.

Parvus and the Pan-European Union

Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.

Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history.  [4] Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War .madness”

Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg and Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.

In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying:

This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.

This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ (and Trotsky’s) close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.

It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to “united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.

Located in an 800-year-old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. [5] This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons

I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter, and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.

This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller.

I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.

As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured. [6] In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s three volume Principia Mathematica published between 1910-1913 set the stage for the latter development of cybernetics and information theory by Russell’s pupil Norbert Wiener

The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?

It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:

The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.

Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.

In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.

Wohlstetter and RAND Corporation

Albert Wohlstetter is another devout Trotskyist who became a leading neo-conservative and controlling hand behind RAND Corporation. It was under Wohlstetter’s influence that RAND Corp became the principal conduit for the intellectual takeover of all branches of US policy on military, economic, and cultural levels.

How did this occur? Through a process known as Cybernetics.

Created by Norbert Wiener as the “practical application” of Lord Bertrand Russell’s “theoretical” Principia Mathematica of 1910-1913, Cybernetics was essentially a ‘science of control’ which became the conduit used to re-brand eugenics into new clothes after World War II.

As I outlined in my recent essay ‘The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits’ the language of Cybernetics was called ‘systems analysis’ and presumed that all systems could be described as closed units susceptible to pure mathematical description and most importantly… manipulation from a scientific elite.

Author Alex Abella described RAND’s systems analysis repackaging of Dialectic Materialism in the following terms in his Soldiers of Reason:

RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.

The key that gives both Dialectic Materialism the same power of evil as the upgraded tool of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Scientifica extolled by Burnham or Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics/systems analysis is found in the following axiom:  “Quantity must always govern quality”.

Under the influence of Wohlsetter’s RAND Corporation, the USA was driven into full scale insanity with a military outlook driven by computer models that presumed nuclear war was a winnable endeavor bringing the world closer to full scale nuclear holocaust. The merging of Darwinism with social science created “eugenics” which presumed that quantitative properties like genetic codes and DNA gave rise to qualitative attributes like “morality”, “wisdom” or “fitness to rule or live”.

In order for society to be brought into acceptance of this new soul-less paradigm of existence, with an invisible master class governing depopulated slaves from above, a vast shock therapy would be called for.

The Frankfurt School Global Revolution

That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?

When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.

Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.

Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.

The Frankfurt School would lay out a comprehensive intellectual framework for a new global aesthetical and scientific revolution premised on the worship of decay, ugliness, and death within a Weberian-Freudian-Marxist synthesis. The system developed by these misanthropic leading priests of the new cult of death would justify the CIA’s funding of abstract art, post-modernist literature, a-tonal music, and other most modernist garbage throughout the Cold War. The launching of this project in full force took the form of a CIA-MI6 funded operation in 1949 dubbed ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Leading organizers of this congress included Lord Bertrand Russell and two former Trotskyists: Sidney Hook and James Burnham.

This group and their role in steering mass education and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.

Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin

To this author’s knowledge, the first time Vladimir Putin laid out a full attack on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a foreign directed color revolution was during his 2021 Valdai Club meeting. At his keynote address, the Russian leader called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:

The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

Notes

1.  Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230.

2. Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277.

3. One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.

4. Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”

5. This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.  “Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

6. In his February 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

• Originally published in the The Last American Vagabond

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matthew J.L. Ehret.

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Painting of the Antikythera Mechanism by the Greek mathematician Dionysios Kriaris. One sees the Cosmos, the front of the computer, and the back with the black spirals of the 19-year Metonic calendar and the 18-year predictive Saros dial. Courtesy Kriaris

Overview

Suppose you could travel back in time to the third century BCE, and visit Alexandria, the capital city of the Greek kingdom of Egypt. Arguably it was the most enlightened, wealthy, and powerful of all the Greek states that flourished after the death of Alexander the Great.

Alexandria was famous for: its Mouseion, university- institute of advanced studies, and the Great Library which was the repository of all the collected wisdom and knowledge of the Greek and Mediterranean world. The Great Library was rather as if you had merged Cambridge, with Harvard, MIT, and the Library of Congress. Among its collections one could find the works of epic poets like Homer and Hesiod, tragic poets like Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides, historians like Herodotos and Thucydides, as well as philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and scientists like Demokritos, Hippokrates, Alkmaion of Croton, Aristarchos of Samos, Eratosthenes, Euclid, Archimedes, Hipparchos, Geminos, Ptolemaios and Galen.

However, if you were to travel forward in time to visit Alexandria 800 years later, in the fifth century of our era, you would find no trace of the Great Library of Alexandria, nor of its sister Mouseion-university. Both had been destroyed by Christian religious zealots. In 415 of our era, a mob of Christian monks told the world that Christianity had no need of the Greeks, nor of their philosophy, science, or literature. To drive home their point, they publicly murdered and tore limb from limb Hypatia, the mathematician and philosopher who headed a leading school of philosophy in Alexandria.

In the 6th century, Justinian, the Christian Emperor of the Eastern Roman empire (Medieval Greece), closed and suppressed the Platonic Academy in Athens, which had existed for more than 900 years. These attacks upon the culture of ancient Greece heralded an enveloping wave of darkness and ignorance for both East and West. This anti-intellectual, Christian fanaticism plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, for almost a thousand years.

These officially sanctioned attacks on Greek philosophy and science gave Christian monks a license to destroy and obliterate treasures of science, including some of the works of Archimedes, the mathematical and engineering genius of the 3rd century BCE. The monks literally scraped the ink from the parchment pages of Archimedes’ scientific texts and then re-filled the erased pages with the texts of religious hymns.

It happened.
Modern dramas with ancient Greek science

In 1998, an American paid $ 2 million for a 769-year-old Christian prayer book known as a palimpsest (a manuscript from which the original text had been scraped-off and which had then been used again). Christian prayer-texts were superimposed over the erased scripts of three works of Archimedes. The slim hope of revealing the lost thoughts of Archimedes was the sole reason why the philanthropist was willing to pay a vast sum of money for the ‘ghost’ of a vanished book.

In 2005, seven years after the Archimedes palimpsest surfaced in New York, an even greater drama was unfolding in the basement of the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens. A team of Greek, British and American scientists and engineers had been struggling to “decode” the secrets of an ancient Greek astronomical device: the “Antikythera Mechanism.” This ancient astronomical computer had been raised from the waters of the tiny Aegean island of Antikythera by sponge divers in 1900. However, in 1900, the technology which could probe the innermost workings of this eroded and encrusted lump of metal did not exist.

Meanwhile, Greek, and foreign scientists kept photographing and handling the fragile surviving fragments of the ancient device. This precipitated the break-up of the mechanism to some 82 fragments.

Front and back sides of the 7 largest and most important fragments of the Antikythera computer. Fragment A is the governing part of the device, enclosing 27 of the surviving 30 gears. Some of those gears are visible on the back side of Fragment A. The back side of Fragment B shows the spirals of the 235-month 19-year Metonic calendar. Courtesy Tom Malzbender and Hewlett Packard.

The early twentieth-century investigators of the Antikythera device also played a guessing game, calling it different names and proposing wrong explanations of its origins and functions. In general, they were reluctant to admit it was part of Hellenic culture. Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist and historian of science and professor at Yale, rejected those doubts and documented in his 1974 seminal report, Gears from the Greeks, that the Antikythera computer was “a singular artifact, the oldest existing relic of scientific technology.” It took another 30 years or so of technological advances before science was able to confirm and advance Price’s findings.

Using microfocus X-ray computed tomography (X-ray CT) and polynomial texture mapping (PTM), belonging to British and American companies, scientists were shocked to discover an interior mechanism of meshed toothed gears, which pointed to a sophisticated and complex mathematical instrument. From the nearly invisible inscriptions engraved on the front and back plates of the bronze device, the experts estimated that the computer was probably manufactured in the 2nd century BCE. In other words, it was over 2,200 years old.

The gears in the interior of the bronze Antikythera astronomical computer. Most of these surviving gears are inside Fragment A. Painting by the Greek artist Evi Sarantea. Courtesy Sarantea.

How can the sale of a Medieval Christian prayer book, (a palimpsest written over the works of Archimedes), possibly be linked to the x-ray investigation of the Antikythera device? In fact, they are parallel threads of the same narrative, which illuminate the fate of Greek science and civilization.

What happened to the advanced work of scientists like Archimedes during the Dark Ages?

Did the ancient Greeks really develop a sophisticated science and technology more than 2,000 years ago? Moreover, if they did achieve such levels of complexity, is the Antikythera Mechanism the product of those same advanced technologies?

Greek computer of genius

My research for writing my book on the Antikythera Mechanism, reveals that the ancient Greeks did indeed develop an advanced science and advanced metal fabrication technologies, which enabled them to build the Antikythera machine. This is extremely important because, to date some classical scholars and scientists have labored under the illusion that modern science is largely the product of post 15th century European thought. They forget that without the mathematical physics of Archimedes Galileo might have been a priest of barber but not a famous physicist. Moreover, they believe that the Greeks never developed technology, much less the advanced technologies needed to construct a mechanical computer and universe, such as the Antikythera Mechanism. In fact, some of the enemies of Hellenic civilization say the Antikythera Mechanism is a time machine, the handiwork of extraterrestrial astronauts.

This propaganda against the Greeks fits nicely with the hubris of scientists dismissing Greek achievements. They say, modern science has taken us to the moon. How can the ancient Greeks possibly be compared to us, they ask. The Greeks fought their wars with bows and arrows, did they not? We have ICBMs, satellite guided predator drones and nuclear weapons. Why should we care if the Greeks ever developed advanced technology?
Why the Greeks?

“We are all Greeks.” These were the heartfelt words of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821: “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece.” Shelley was one of many Philhellenes who fought alongside the Greeks during the War of Independence, in the heroic struggle to expel the Turkish occupiers of their homeland.

Jacob Burckhardt, the famous Swiss cultural historian, was grateful to the Greeks for laying the foundations of Western culture, enabling men to become civilized. He said in 1872 that the Europeans see the world through the eyes of the Greeks and to abandon them would be to accept their own decline.

In 1948, the English poet W. H. Auden suggested that the people of the West owe their very existence to the Greeks. He said the Greeks taught us to think about thinking, that is, to ask questions. Without the Greeks, he said, “we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or worse, fully human.”

In the late 1950s, E. J. Dijksterhuis, Dutch historian of mathematics and natural sciences, said that any inquiry on the origins of present-day knowledge inevitably leads us back to Hellas, especially in mathematics and natural sciences.

And in 1999, the English scholar and historian, Charles Freeman, argued that the Greeks “provided the chromosomes of Western civilization.”

These scholars are right. The Greeks are us. Greek science made the Antikythera astronomical computer. The Greeks thought of science and technology existed mainly for the good of society as well as for understanding nature.

Computer of heavens and Earth

The Antikythera Mechanism was not merely a bauble for the elite to educate themselves about the heavens. It was the workhorse of an evolving technology which provided knowledge about the heavens, connecting the Greeks to Nature, their culture. and the gods.

The Antikythera computer illuminates the relevance of Greek thought and engineering to our own times. Our computer-based society is undoubtedly built on the marvels of high technology. However, if technology is not used for the ‘public good’ it can undermine society rather than being a benefit to it, as we see in the current misplaced excitement about Artificial Intelligence.

Galen, the Greek medical genius of the 2nd century of our era and the greatest physician after Hippocrates, put it bluntly. If wealth is put before virtue, he said, it spoils and corrupts science. In marked contrast, the Antikythera device came into being to serve the public good. It brought the heavens nearer to Earth and into human understanding. It served as an accurate calendar of human events and a calendar of the celestial universe, a moving map of the constellations and a mirror of nature and the heavens.

We admire the ancient Greeks for their invention of Democracy. We celebrate their unsurpassed achievements in providing us with the foundations of: literature, epic poetry, theater, architecture, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and the Olympic Games.

Greek foundations of modern science

It is the fact that the Greeks, laid the foundations of modern science, the ultimate touchstone of knowledge and power, that makes them so important to us. That is why the discovery of a vandalized book of Archimedes was big news and the decoding of a 2200-year-old Greek computer has been of extraordinary importance.

The Antikythera discovery was undoubtedly the key to unlocking a better understanding of ancient Greek science. This ancient computer gives us profound new insights into the science and philosophy of ancient Greece that has reshaped our conception of the origins of Western science. Moreover, on a purely human level, the story of the discovery of the computer, the researchers and scholars who unraveled its secrets is a compelling drama in its own right. Why did Modern Greek scientists wait a century and the initiative of foreign scientists before they embarked on the decoding of this ancient computer? Could it be that the state of Greece could not afford the research? Indebted Greece has been looted by foreigners, so it could not even think of the importance of the Antikythera computer. But the few Greek scientists that grasped the significance of the ancient device value it much more than their British and American colleagues.

Laptop predictive computer

An additional view of the interlocking toothed gears of the Antikythera computer. Modified by Alexander Nicaise of the Skeptical Inquirer. Courtesy Nicaise.

The complicated set of interlocking cogs and wheels of the Antikythera Mechanism were governed by a differential gear. Ιn itself this was a technological marvel of enormous importance. It could accurately predict the phases of the Moon. Throughout the twentieth century and for almost two decades of the twenty-first century, archaeologists, scientists, and historians of science struggled to unlock the true nature of this ancient computer. Finally after the new discoveries of Derek de Solla Price in 1974 and again those discoveries of 2005, the picture is clear.

The Antikythera device played the role of a mechanical universe. In fact, it was a predictive mechanical universe in itself, carrying out the predictive legacy of the Titan god Prometheus (forethought). It predicted eclipses of the Sun and the Moon. It computed the motions and positions of the planets. It provided an accurate calendar for farmers, who were concerned over when to sow and harvests. It enabled priests to make sacrifices to the gods at the correct season, that is, when the gods expected the offerings.

The Antikythera computer also tracked the Panhellenic religious and athletic festivals like the Olympics. It was powered by a simple manual crank. Yet, for all its simplicity, this portable (laptop) astronomical device was a product of an advanced science and technology. Its triumph was to unite the heavens and the Earth, to illuminate the workings of the Cosmos for human inspection and to provide practical knowledge that enriched the lives of its users.

An early reproduction of the Antikythera Mechanism by Dionysios Kriaris. The front or Cosmos does not include the planets, but it shows a golden sphere of the Sun at the center and a smaller sphere depicting a phase of the Moon. This Cosmos is surrounded by two spherical zones, the outside representing the 365-day year calendar. The inside circle is the Zodiac of 12 constellations. Behind the Cosmos, we see the upper spiral of the 19-year Metonic calendar. The lower spiral is the 18-year predictive Saros dial. Courtesy Kriaris.

This sophisticated predictive machine embodied the scientific method and philosophy of Aristotle (fourth century BCE), the mathematics of Archimedes (third century BCE), the engineering of Ktesibios and Archimedes (third century BCE), and the mathematical astronomy of Hipparchos (second century BCE). It was Hellenic civilization in miniature.

Notes

1. The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: The Modern Library, 1994) 501. ↑

2. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, tr. Sheila Stern, ed. Oswyn Murray (New York: St. Martin Press, 1998) 12. ↑

3. W.H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1973) 32. ↑

4. E. J. Dijksterhuis, “The Origins of Classical Mechanics from Aristotle to Newton” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) 164. ↑

5. Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement (New York: Penguin Books, 2000) 434. ↑

6. Galen, The Best Doctor is also a Philosopher 57-61, in Selected Works, tr. P. N. Singer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). ↑

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

The post Can Aristotle Inspire a New Civilization? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Prologue

The world in 2023 is in deep trouble. The United States and other countries act as if they care less about the future. They scarcely pay attention to the evolving horrors of climate change, ecological impoverishment of the planet, and rapidly growing population, which is surpassing 8 billion humans. Should most of these people ever reach the “lifestyle” of privileged Europeans and North Americans, it would be necessary to have several Earth-like planets to supply the materials and water and food of the entire human population.

Ecopolitical governance

I have spoken before of the need of an international institution to bring order to the current chaos in international relations. People cannot go on increasing their numbers. If religions are behind this prolific multiplication of the human species, take away the tax privileges of those religions. Unchecked burning of fossil fuels will kill us and all life on Earth. I dreamed this world institution might put some sense of urgency in the brains of world leaders before it’s too late. I called that institution World Environment Organization, WEO.

The mission of such a global environment institution would be to protect life on Earth. It should bring world resources and scientific and technological talent for the protection of biological diversity on land, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. In addition, WEO should protect the Earth and its people and their civilization from rapid and dangerous population growth and climate change and toxic chemicals and pollution.

It would be to the interest of all states to support this organization, but its main political sponsors should be the European Union, the United States, Russia, China, and India. It just happens that these powerful states have large populations and are the worst offenders of the global environment. They emit the overwhelming amounts of greenhouse gases warming the planet and causing the dreadful climate chaos afflicting the Earth. If the existing climate emergency brings them together to face a common climate enemy, humanity has a chance to at least tone down the ferocity of the climate onslaught and resulting chaos.

Such a potential political partnership for human survival and security would transform international relations from wrestling to dancing. Time for geostrategic competition is over. We must cooperate to end wars and preserve peace. At a time when the Earth is on fire lighted by humans, there’s no need for superpowers showing off their nuclear muscles.

WEO should bring the war in Ukraine to an end and dissolve NATO that caused the war. President Joe Biden must admit he erred in arming Ukraine. And just like Mikhail Gorbachev abolished the military alliances of the Soviet Union / Russia in the late 1980s, Biden can do the same thing with NATO. Biden also needs to abandon his Cold War against China. Taiwan is a Chinese island. Let China and Taiwan resolve their differences. Stop arming Taiwan.

The European Union can take care of its own defence. Even without the United Kingdom, it’s probably the strongest economic and technological powerhouse on Earth. Small states would no longer be afraid of being invaded by larger enemies. EU, the US, China, India, and Russia would guarantee international borders and peace. Russia would also feel secure to stop its war against Ukraine.

If the WEO came into being, there would be a dramatic decline in military spending, showing that civilisation matters. What if those saved vast sums of money, currently put to fighting wars and planning slaughter and destruction, could be put to peaceful use? Like jointly addressing the existential threat of climate change and the social and ecological problems unsettling the US, EU, Russia, China, India and the rest of the world? Imagine an ecological and political alliance between North America, Europe, Russia, India, and China that materializes the mission of the World Environment Organisation for diminishing the threats of climate change and the protection of human and environmental health. Imagine that nothing in international relations, including world trade, could take place if it caused ecological harm.

People would learn to respect nature as the very foundation of life on Earth. That’s what ecological civilization is all about.

Imagine such an organisation funding substantive program aimed at reversing the environmental decline of the planet, banning plastics, cleaning the plastic pollution of the seas, and, particularly, slowing down climate change, which threatens all life on Earth. This task would be both daring and demanding because, as in the golden age of Greece, the human effort of the twenty-first century must be to invent a new science and a new politics to solve human problems, but without destroying the world.

Twentieth-century science and economic development (in the unitary capitalist models in use in the twenty-first century) are obsolete and dangerous: they have been tainted and moulded by the violence of the nuclear bomb and the chemicals-depended one-crop agriculture.

Factory farming

Industrialised agriculture is a paradigm of the application of bomb-inspired science. It is a gigantic mechanical enterprise contemptible of the natural world. It is fuelled by Earth-warming petroleum. It has brought into being systems of death rather than life. It threatens and destroys ecological civilization. Its immense one-crop plantations are artificial deserts that devastate insects, birds, and wildlife. Plantations annihilate biological diversity. They are copies of feudalism, enslaving farm workers, grabbing (for example, in the United States) more than 80 percent of the drinking water, and producing food tainted by carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals. In other words, this form of farming poisons both the natural world and humans eating its crops.

The poisons that farmers spray over crops control insects, diseases and grasses only as an afterthought. This is because these toxins are primarily political. They enable landowners or states to be sole masters of huge territories while, at the same time, emptying rural areas of small family farmers, peasants, and indigenous people.

Animal farms make up the top of the pyramid of agribusiness. In the United States, they are feeding about 9 billion of frightened and abused domesticated animals fattened for slaughter. Domesticated animals exist in high-tech factories resembling sterile concentration camps. They house thousands of pigs, chicken, and cattle.

These animals live their short lives in extremely crowded conditions resembling sardine cans. Animal farms are filthy, generating diseases, which the owners try to control by adding antibiotic drugs to the feed they give the animals.

The large quantities of urine and excrement from the penned animals give off ammonia, methane, and viruses, some of which become pandemics. Moreover, these wastes are not treated for toxicity and deseases. Farmers spread some on land and hold the rest in lagoons. When it rains or a storm causes flooding, these toxic and pathogenic wastes end up in groundwater, rivers, lakes, and the seas where they cause ecological devastations like the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Industrialised farming is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. It also rivals climate change in its global deleterious effects. It is converting everything to a machine.

In the US, agribusiness has abolished rural America, turning it into a colossal, mechanised plantation with enormous powers. Agribusiness is also employing genetic engineering in undoing food itself, scrambling the genetic stuff of corn and soybeans and other crops to bring all food and crops under the dominion of a handful of global corporations. That is why we need to embrace agroecology, a science that is not tainted by the nuclear bomb and the political power of billionaires. Agroecology merges traditional agricultural knowledge with the latest discoveries of ecology. Ethics and ecological civilisation are the context of agroecology.

Aristotle argued that cataclysms repeatedly reduce human societies to a point where it is necessary to search in the rubble to rediscover human culture. We are not yet the refugees of a global catastrophe, but we are headed in that direction. Industrialised agriculture is the first step in that decline and fall. Climate change follows in the footsteps of giant farming.

Slow down climate change

Extracting and burning petroleum, natural gas, and coal are responsible for greenhouse gases causing climate change. These invisible toxins of our industrialised culture are warming the planet, making it slowly unfit for life. Alaska’s permafrost is thawing. The Arctic is releasing “enormous” amounts of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas causing climate chaos. Massive chunks of ice on mountains and seas, including the Arctic, are disintegrating. President Joe Biden accelerated that destructive process with his approval, in March 2023, of oil extraction from the Arctic of Alaska. Fires are destroying forests, including the Amazon. Storms are threatening cities and farming. Heat waves are changing the chemistry and temperature of the seas. This change is becoming inimical to fish and aquatic life. Commercial overfishing adds more stress on already overstressed life in the seas and oceans.

It is probably impossible to stop entirely the warming of the Earth. But we can slow it down, diminishing its chronic cataclysmic effects by steadfastly eliminating and ending the use of fossil fuels. We also must end our onslaught on the planet.

Epilogue

Are we clever enough, but not moral enough to avoid committing suicide?

Yet there’s a way out of our current killer policies: first, solar and other forms of renewable energy suffice in replacing oil, coal, petroleum and nuclear power.

Second, organic family farmers and peasants are willing to and capable of raising all the food we need, if only we dismantle the monstrous agribusiness plantations and animal factories.

Expanding the variety of our food crops from the rich diversity of traditional agriculture will go a long way to improving our diet, and lessen the need to dam rivers for irrigation. Such a change of direction would give a new lease on life to millions of villages while bringing back the culture, democracy and nutritious food of prosperous small family farmers and peasants.

If the US, EU, Russia, China, and India sign on a version of this modest proposal, we boost ecopolitical civilization and human survival. We really need a World Environment Organization to set the world in order and harmony between humans and wildlife. Half of all the waters and land of the planet should be set aside for wildlife and biological diversity. One-child per family is necessary to reduce the exploding population. I urge the EU, US, India, Russia, and China to embrace this idea for a better, more peaceful, and safer and healthier world of ecological civilization.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Photograph Source: U.S. Army Europe photo by Visual Information Specialist Markus Rauchenberger – Public Domain

“To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut.

Cast Putin as the latest manifestation of the Führer and the resurrection of Winston Churchill can’t be far behind. And, lo, more than a few observers have already begun depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the latest reincarnation of America’s favorite British prime minister.

These days, it may be Western-supplied missiles downing “kamikaze drones” rather than Spitfires tangling with Messerschmitts over southern England, but the basic scenario remains intact. In the skies above Ukraine and on the battlefields below, the “finest hour” of 1940 is being reenacted. Best of all, we know how this story ends — or at least how it’s supposed to end: with evil vanquished and freedom triumphant. Americans have long found comfort in such simplified narratives. Reducing history to a morality play washes away annoying complexities. Why bother to think when the answers are self-evident?

A Case of Whataboutism?

Not that donning the mantle of Churchill necessarily guarantees a happy outcome — or even continued U.S. support. Recall, for example, that during a visit to Saigon in May 1961, Vice President Lyndon Johnson infamously anointed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem the “Churchill of Asia.”

Alas, that exalted title didn’t spare Diem from being overthrown and murdered in a CIA-facilitated coup slightly more than two years later. U.S. complicity in bumping off South Vietnam’s stand-in for Churchill marked a critical turning point in the Vietnam War, transforming an annoyance into an out-and-out debacle. An appreciation for such ironies may help explain why Zelensky’s preferred anti-Nazi isn’t Winston Churchill but Charlie Chaplin.

All of that said, defending civilization is an honorable and necessary cause that deserves the support of every American. Where things get sticky is in deciding how to frame such an essential task. Put bluntly, who gets to choose what’s both honorable and necessary? In the editorial offices of the Atlantic and similarly Russophobic quarters, the unacknowledged assumption is, of course, that we do, where “we” means the West and, above all, the United States.

Timothy Snyder, a self-described “historian of political atrocity” who teaches at Yale, subscribes to this proposition. He recently weighed in with 15 reasons “Why the World Needs Ukrainian Victory.” Those 15 range widely indeed. A Ukrainian victory, Snyder asserts, will (#1) “defeat an ongoing genocidal project”; (#3) “end an era of empire”; and (#6) “weaken the prestige of tyrants.” By teaching an object lesson to China, it will also (#9) “lift the threat of major war in Asia.” For those worried about the climate crisis, defeating Russia will also (#14) “accelerate the shift from fossil fuels.” My own #1 is Snyder’s #13: a win for Ukraine will “guarantee food supplies and prevent future starvation.”

Put simply, according to Synder, a Ukrainian victory over Russia will have a redemptive impact on just about any imaginable subject, transforming the global order along with humanity itself. Ukrainians, he writes, “have given us a chance to turn this century around.” Again, let me emphasize that what gives me pause is the “us.”

That Professor Snyder along with the editors of the Atlantic (and similarly pugnacious publications) should focus so intently on the unfolding events in Ukraine is understandable enough. After all, the war there is a horror. And while Vladimir Putin’s crimes may fall well short of Hitler’s — whatever his malign intent may have been, stalwart Ukrainian resistance has certainly taken genocide off the table — he is indeed a menace of the first order and his reckless aggression deserves to fail.

Whether Ukrainian bravery combined with advanced Western weaponry will, however, have more than a passing impact on world history strikes me as a dubious proposition. Granted, on that score, I may be in the minority. Along with causing immense suffering, Putin’s war has unleashed a tidal wave of hyperbole, with Professor Snyder’s 15 reasons but one example.

As someone who makes no pretense to being an “historian of political atrocity” — the most I can muster is to classify myself as a “student of American folly” — my guess is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will have about as much lasting impact as our own invasion of Iraq, its 20th anniversary now approaching.

Bold to the point of recklessness, George W. Bush and his associates set out to alter the course of history. By invading a distant land deemed critical for this country’s national security, they sought to inaugurate a new era of American global dominance (styled “liberation” for propaganda purposes). The results achieved, to put it mildly, were different than expected.

However grotesque, Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine seem almost modest by comparison. Through an invasion and war of choice (styled an anti-fascist crusade for propaganda purposes), he sought to reassert Russian dominance over a nation the Kremlin had long deemed essential to its security. The results achieved so far, we can safely say, have proven to be other than those he expected.

When the Russian president embarked on his war in 2022, he had no idea what he was getting into, any more than George W. Bush did in 2003. Admittedly, the two make odd bedfellows and one can easily imagine each taking offense at being compared to the other. Still, the comparison is unavoidable: In the present century, Putin and Bush have been de facto collaborators in perpetrating havoc.

Some might charge me with committing the sin of whataboutism, pointing an accusing finger in one direction to excuse iniquity in another, but that’s hardly my intent. There’s no letting Putin off the hook: his actions have been those of a vile criminal.

Civilization at Risk?

But if Putin is a criminal, how then are we to judge those who conceived of, sold, launched, and thoroughly botched the Iraq War? With the passing of 20 years, has some statute of limitations kicked in to drain that conflict of relevance? My own sense is that the national security establishment is now strongly inclined to pretend that the Iraq War (and the Afghanistan War as well) never happened. Such an exercise in selective memory helps validate the insistence that Ukraine has once more conferred on the United States the primary responsibility for defending “civilization.” That no one else can assume that role is simply taken for granted in Washington.

Which brings us back to the nub of the issue: How is it that this particular conflict puts civilization itself at risk? Why should rescuing Ukraine take priority over rescuing Haiti or Sudan? Why should fears of genocide in Ukraine matter more than the ongoing genocide targeting the Rohingya in Myanmar? Why should supplying Ukraine with modern arms qualify as a national priority, while equipping El Paso, Texas, to deal with a flood of undocumented migrants figures as an afterthought? Why do Ukrainians killed by Russia generate headlines, while deaths attributable to Mexican drug cartels — 100,000 Americans from drug overdoses annually – are treated as mere statistics?

Of the various possible answers to such questions, three stand out and merit reflection.

The first is that “civilization,” as the term is commonly employed in American political discourse, doesn’t encompass places like Haiti or Sudan. Civilization derives from Europe and remains centered in Europe. Civilization implies Western culture and values. So, at least, Americans — especially members of our elite — have been conditioned to believe. And even in an age that celebrates diversity, that belief persists, however subliminally.

What makes Russian aggression so heinous, therefore, is that it victimizes Europeans, whose lives are deemed to possess greater value than the lives of those who reside in implicitly less important regions of the world. That there is a racialist dimension to such a valuation goes without saying, however much U.S. officials may deny that fact. Bluntly, the lives of white Ukrainians matter more than the lives of the non-whites who populate Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

The second answer is that casting the Ukraine War as a struggle to defend civilization creates a perfect opportunity for the United States to reclaim its place at the forefront of that very civilization. After years wasted wandering in the desert, the United States can now ostensibly return to its true calling.

President Zelensky’s astutely crafted address to Congress emphasized that return. By comparing his own troops to the G.I.s who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and quoting President Franklin Roosevelt on the inevitability of “absolute victory,” it was as if Winston Churchill himself had indeed reappeared in the Capitol to enlist Americans in the cause of righteousness.

Needless to say, Zelensky skipped past the distinctly un-Churchillian lapse in that tradition signified by the presidency of Donald Trump. Nor did he mention his own flirtation with Trump, which included assurances that “you are a great teacher for us.”

“America is back,” Joe Biden declared on multiple occasions during the first weeks of his presidency, and the Ukrainian president has been only too happy to repeatedly validate that claim as long as the flow of arms and munitions to sustain his forces continues. This country’s disastrous post-9/11 wars may have raised doubts about whether the United States had kept its proper place on the right side of history. With Zelensky signaling his approval, however, Washington’s participation in a proxy war — our treasure, someone else’s blood — seems to have quieted those doubts.

One final factor may contribute to this eagerness to see civilization itself under deadly siege in Ukraine.  Demonizing Russia provides a convenient excuse for postponing or avoiding altogether a critical reckoning with the present American version of that civilization. Classifying Russia as a de facto enemy of the civilized world has effectively diminished the urgency of examining our own culture and values.

Think of it as an inverse conception of whataboutism. Shocking Russian brutality and callous disregard for Ukrainian lives divert attention from similar qualities not exactly uncommon on our very own streets.

As I began work on this essay, the Biden administration had just announced its decision to provide Ukraine with a handful of this country’s most advanced M-1 Abrams tanks. Hailed in some quarters as a “game changer,” the arrival of relatively small numbers of those tanks months or more from now is unlikely to make a decisive difference on the battlefield.

Yet the decision has had this immediate effect: It affirms the U.S. commitment to prolonging the Ukraine War. And when credit earned for sending tanks is exhausted, the editors of the Atlantic backed by professors from Yale will undoubtedly press for F-16 fighter jets and long-range rockets President Zelensky is already requesting.

Consider all of this, then, a signature of America in our time. Under the guise of turning the century around, we underwrite violence in faraway lands and thereby dodge the actual challenges of changing our own culture. Unfortunately, when it comes to rehabilitating our own democracy, all the Abrams tanks in the world won’t save us.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Andrew Bacevich.

Prince of the Lilies, fresco in the palace of Minoan Knossos, Crete, about 1,650 BCE. Wikipedia.

Bronze has been an important metal for millennia. Some two thousand years of Greek history come under the Bronze Age, 3,100 – 1,000 years BCE. This was a time of enormous creativity and courage when institutions and civilization took deep roots, blossoming into Archaic, Classical, and Alexandrian Greece.

Cyclades and Lemnos

The Cycladic islands in southern Aegean and the island of Lemnos in northern Aegean developed the earliest mining and metallurgy in Greece. The polis of Poliochni in Lemnos distinguished itself by its pioneering architecture and metallurgy. It helped certainly that Hephaistos, the god of metallurgy, craftsmanship, advanced technology, fire, and volcanoes, had one of his workshops in Poliochni. Who could resist such a divine model? Because of Poliochni, Lemnos became an outstanding center of metalworking and technological innovation in the Bronze Age.

The Cyclades also made considerable advances in shipbuilding, propulsion, and sea travel with the assistance of pictorial representations of the constellations. In fact the Cycladic islanders were so much caught up in nautical technology, sea exploration, fishing, and culture of ships that they were the first people in the Aegean to incise them on pottery, carve them on rocks, and create lead models of them. The Greek archaeologist Christos Doumas, who excavated and studied the iconic Cycladic island of Thera, reported that the material culture of Cyclades was original and rich in architecture, pottery, marble carvings and sanitation.

The sanitation practices of the Cycladic islands are telling of the advanced culture of Bronze Age Greece. Ceramic pipes under paved streets delivered clean drinking water to many homes and other pipes took wastes away from homes. These sanitation practices arrived in Western Europe some five thousand years later, in late nineteenth century.

Minos and his Cretan sea empire

The large Aegean island of Crete and mainland Greece flourished during the Bronze age as well. Crete in fact built such a sophisticated civilization that it became nearly a paradigm for the development of Greece.

During the time that the Argonaut expedition took place, sometime in late thirteenth century BCE, it is possible to speak of Pax Minoica, the Minoan Peace in the Aegean and Crete that lasted for about 1,000 years between the second and first millennium BCE.

Minoica and Minoan come from Minos, son of the supreme Olympian god Zeus and Europa / Europe, daughter of Agenor, son of the sea god Poseidon and Libya. Zeus took the form of a bull and attracted Europa and brought her to Crete.

Winged Talos robot Hephaistos made for Zeus who gave it to his lover Europa in Crete. In order to protect Europa and Crete, the robot flew over the island 3 times a day. The bull is the form Zeus took to approach Europa. Courtesy Numismatic Museum, Athens.

Europa gave birth to Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthys. Europa’s brother, Kadmos, kept searching for her until he reached the polis of Thebes in Boeotia or Central Greece. Meanwhile, Minos became king of Crete. He married Pasiphae, daughter of the Sun god Helios. Minos, like his brother Rhadamanthys, was a great legislator and judge.

The father of history, Herodotos, and the greatest Greek philosophers, Plato, and Aristotle, say that Minos exercised tremendous power at sea. Aristotle speaks of Minos’ thalassocracy, an empire of the sea in the Aegean and the Mediterranean (The Politics 1271b32).

Crete, Aristotle says, was intended by nature to be dominant in Hellas. It is a large island well situated in the midst of Hellenes. This is true. Crete was without military forts or an army in the second-first millennium BCE. Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War in late fifth century BCE, also says that Minos’ navy was the first in the Greek world. With such a pioneering force, Minos became a master of the Aegean, ending piracy in the sea, and governing the Cyclades with his sons (The Peloponnesian War 1.4).

Mycenaean Greeks

In 1625 BCE, however, the explosion of the Cycladic island of Thera did some damage to Crete and its Minoan culture. In 1450 BCE Mycenaean Greeks (from Mycenae in Peloponnesos) were in charge in Knossos, one of the key states in Crete. But even before the coming of the Mycenaeans to Crete, mainland Greeks possibly borrowed ideas of economic, cultural, and political organization and development from Crete. The reverse is also possible. After all, both Minoans and Mycenaeans were Greeks.

In the second millennium BCE, the era of Minos, the important states in eastern Crete were Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and Zakro. In continental Greece the states that made a difference next to Mycenae-Argos were Pylos in Peloponnesos, Thebes and Orchomenos in Boeotia, and Iolkos in Thessaly. The last two, Orchomenos and Iolkos, played a decisive role in the Argonaut expedition to Kolchis, the Greeks’ Far East. All these Bronze age states had monarchical bureaucracies that supervised specialized labor for domestic and international trade. They did large-scale works like the draining of lake Kopais in northern Boeotia.

Pylos

Pylos, a state in southwestern Peloponnesos, for example, had some 50,000 people with 2,500 in the city of Pylos. The king of Pylos had 400 bronze smiths employed in the palace. They worked for him and the state. But they also made goods from gold, copper, tin, and amber. These raw materials Pylos imported in order to fashion them into the necessary and beautiful artifacts for its trade and culture.

Another far-reaching political institution of Pylos was in the administration of the kingdom. Pylos had small governing communes called damos, which evolved into demos and democracy in classical times.

Mycenaean products for export found their way all the way to England and central Europe. Both Mycenaeans and Minoans improved shipbuilding and navigation. The Minoan and Mycenaean influence on each other expressed itself in a variety of institutions and practices, including the carving of seal stones, ivory, gems, gold, sculpture, and painting.

The Griffin warrior

An American couple from the Classics Department of the University of Cincinnati, Jack L. Davis, and Sharon R. Stocker, hit the jackpot in 2015 when they excavated a tomb near the palace of the Homeric King Nestor in Pylos. The treasures were dated to 1,750s BCE. The couple were so excited and proud by their findings they wrote a book about the importance of Pylos in Bronze Age Greece: A Greek State in Formation: The Origins of Civilization in Mycenaean Pylos (University of California Press, 2022).

This is a wide-ranging and very interesting story of Pylos and its seminal role in the emergence of Greek civilization. Davis is the main author of this book. Stocker joins Davis in the last chapter and the epilogue. Davis is the Carl Blegen professor of archaeology at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Blegen made important contributions to Greek prehistory while professor of archaeology at the University of Cincinnati.

Davis and his wife, Stocker, argue that Pylos was fundamental in the emergence of Greek civilization. This conclusion in 2022 reflects the praise of the Mycenaean Greeks by the Greek Culture Minister Melina Merkouri in the book Mycenaean Kosmos: Five Centuries of Precocious Greek Civilization, 1600 – 1100 BC. The book was published in Greek in 1989.

In 2017, Sharon Stocker almost repeated Merkouri’s enthusiasm for the Mycenaeans. She said: “The Mycenaeans sowed the seeds of our common traditions, including art and architecture, language, philosophy, and literature, even democracy and religion. This was a crucial time in the development of what would become Western civilization.”

In their 2022 book, Stocker and Davis were astonished and delighted by their discovery of exquisite golden rings, weapons and armor, silver cups, bronze cups, and jugs, including gems and stones decorated by beautiful scenes of life in Mycenaean Greece. One tiny agate stone depicted a young and handsome warrior king killing two men. The warrior looks like Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, when Achilles was killing the Trojan superhero Hector: heroes out of the pages of the Iliad of Homer, though this would be impossible because the Trojan War took place centuries after the exploits of the Cretan Griffin Warrior king. The Trojan War took place in late thirteenth century BCE.

Davis and Stocker described their spectacular finding of the Griffin Warrior as “one of the finest works of prehistoric Greek art ever discovered.” The art was on a tiny gem or sealstone. In their book, A Greek State in Formation, they explain the meaning of the carved gem:

“An extraordinary find from Pylos… from the grave of the Griffin Warrior, may be the finest example of glyptic art from the Greek Bronze Age ever found. It is a Cretan work of the New Palace period [1750 – 1700 BCE]. The face of this seal stone bears a representation of combat that draws on an iconography of battle scenes… The level of detail in the representation of weapons and clothing, like the attention given to the physiognomy of the human bodies, is without parallel. We realized almost immediately that we had unearthed a masterpiece.”

The Griffin Warrior is killing his enemies. The Cretan engraved gem is dated to about 1750s BCE and found in a tomb near King Nestor’s palace in Pylos, Peloponnesos. Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis made the discovery. Courtesy of the Palace of Nestor Excavations Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati.

Davis tried to explain how most people of Pylos made a living working the land. He imagined a Medieval or modern feudal class system. He assumed the Greeks of Pylos must have done things Medieval Europeans and twenty-first century Americans / Europeans — do. He says: “there had been an intensification in land use [in Pylos] in the Early Mycenaean period [about 3,000 BCE], one that we think reflects the creation of elite benefices, landed estates granted in tenure to those at the top of the social and political order.”

In theory, Davis may be right. Inequality, even slavery, has a very long history in both Greece and elsewhere in the world. After the Trojan War, Sparta did enslave the descendants of Mycenae and Pylos, making them Helots for centuries. What is problematic with Davis’ interpretation of Pylos culture is his use of the word “intensification” for describing the raising of more food. But “intensification in land use” is an expression of modern farmers addicted to chemicals and machines.

In addition, Davis is caught up with his own time and society, using freely concepts that may not be relevant in understanding the society at Pylos more than 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. He says:

“It is hard to imagine that integration within the Minoan world did not play a decisive role in promoting growth in trade, intensification of agricultural production, greater acquisitiveness on the part of mainlanders, more specialization in craft manufacture, and the formation of larger political units through wars of expansion. Systems theory anticipates that growth in subsystems eventually reaches a point where any additional increase, however small, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. A system will be transformed and restructure itself in an unprecedented manner. It was at that point that Mycenaean society stabilized itself within a new social system based on the institutionalization of inherited leadership, rank, and privilege.”

Once again, Davis may be right, though, as I said, the possibility is negligible. He even challenged the Greek identity of some Mycenaeans. He says: “It can no longer be assumed that all those who shared Mycenaean culture were Greek speakers or that Mycenaean culture was an inevitable expression of any latent Hellenic identity.”

Davis is not alone. Many archaeologists excavating archaeological sites in Greece come to those fields of potential surprising discoveries and knowledge with their heads full of non-Greek metaphysics, that is, monotheistic ideas, multiculturalism, notions of superiority of modern farming, technology, science, and political ideology of their home country and university that educated them. So, their findings, if any, go through the filters of this metaphysical baggage. Modern ideas of what life is about in all cases form an invisible barrier between the archaeologist and the discovered Greek treasures.

Homer and his gods

The classic example of how divided archaeologists are about Greece is Homer and the Trojan War. A few of them see Homer and the Trojan War as history. Homer was indeed the great epic poet ancient Greeks thought and said he was. Polytheist Greeks nearly worshipped Homer and his gods. He was their teacher. Aristotle edited the Iliad for his pupil Alexander the Great. Alexander’s hero was Achilles. The Trojan War took place in late thirteenth century BCE.

However, many archaeologists ignore the sayings of ancient Greeks, much less the nineteenth century paradigmatic findings of Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur German archaeologist who unearthed Homer’s Mycenae “rich in gold” and Troy, “the sacred Ilion” and “the trainer of horses.” Schliemann was so successful because he trusted Homer. But many modern archaeologists and classical scholars who are afraid of the gods in the epics of Homer keep saying Homer did not exist and brand the Iliad and Odyssey as fiction.

The doubters of Homer see the gigantic stone walls the Mycenaeans built for the fortification of their towns or settlements and conclude that Mycenaean Greeks lived in terror and perpetual war. But perhaps they did not. The Cyclopean walls might have served the cause of peace.

Minoans and Mycenaeans

The Mycenaeans and Minoans were Greeks. They probably had their occasional fights, but they also had centuries of cooperation and peace. They sent members of their communities to the Cyclades, Rhodes, and Miletos in the coast of Asia Minor. They had trading settlements in southern Italy and Sicily. The Minoans had a strong influence in the Cyclades, particularly on the islands’ architecture, pottery, and metallurgy. But because the Cyclades had such a distinguished tradition of navigation, the Mycenaeans-Minoans left them pretty much alone.

Davis, however, speaks of Minoanization among Mycenaean Greeks in the mainland. He says the Pylos elite found Minoan culture irresistible. The Greek leaders of Pylos, Davis says, “knew the finer aspects of Minoan society; they wanted them for themselves; and they drew on its material culture as their own society leapt to a higher level of complexity.”

This speculation has the ring of truth. We all wish to improve ourselves. And the Minoans and Mycenaeans advanced their own culture by borrowing from each other. They sowed the seeds for later Greek achievements in techne, craftsmanship, architecture, astronomy, piety for the gods, science, and the arts of civilization.

So, despite flights of imagination, Davis and Stocker have broaden our understanding of Bronze Age Greece, particularly in Pylos. Their discovery of the Griffin Warrior and numerous other treasures was a just reward for their persistence and hard work – for 25 years. They should become models, especially for Greek archaeologists who need to do much more excavations. All of Greece is an archaeological site.

A Greek State in Formation by Davis and Stocker is a very important and timely book. It adds another Cyclopean stone to the edifice of knowledge and insight being built on how Greek civilization started and matured in the Bronze Age and, eventually, became the backbone that shaped Archaic, Classical, and Alexandrian Greece and – more than a thousand years later — the West.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

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Olympeion: temple of the Olympian Zeus near the Acropolis of Athens. Ut took several centuries for the construction of the temple. The Roman Emperor Hadrian finished it in 131-132. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Unless one visits Hellas / Greece and sees the ruins of ancient temples, theaters, and stadia, it is difficult to understand the magnificence of the country more than 2,500 years ago. Museums (in Greece and other Western countries) remain the depositories of mere fractions of the treasures that used to be all over ancient Greece.

Decline and fall of ancient Greece

The main reasons for the decline and fall of Greece include the civil conflict, Peloponnesian War, in the last quarter of the fifth century BCE, the failure of Alexander the Great and his successors to grasp the danger from Rome, the Roman occupation of Greece in 146 BCE, and the decision of the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century to outlaw ancient Greek and Roman polytheism in favor of Christianity.

The triumph of Christianity sealed the fate of Hellas. No more Olympics, shutting down of oracles like that in Delphi, abandoning democracy, universities, and theater. Anti-Hellenic fanaticism exploded in late fourth century with the burning of libraries, including the jewel of the Alexandrian Age, the Library of Alexandria, which easily had half a million books in its collections.

The Greeks who resisted such violence disappeared, like Hypatia in 415. She was teaching Hellenic philosophy and science in Alexandria. Monks working for the bishop tore her to pieces. These crimes were part and parcel of the systematic destruction of the altars and temples of the gods.

Churches replaced the ruined temples. In fact, most churches were built on the foundations of temples.

Church facing the temple of Nike on the Acropolis. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.

The Parthenon did not escape the mission and wrath of the new political order. The temple of Athena was light and Enlightenment. It was the masterpiece of Greek civilization. The Christians nevertheless made it a church and, when the Moslems took over the country in 1453, the Christian Parthenon became a Moslem Mosque Parthenon. As if this abuse of the sacred temple of virgin Athena was not enough, Venetians bombed it in the seventeenth century.

Ruins and darkness covered Greece until 1821 when the Greeks defeated their Turkish oppressors and Greece became an independent country.

Archaeology in occupied Greece

Political independence brought archaeology to Greece. The “great” European powers, England, France, and Russia, and eventually Germany and the United States, speeded up their looting of the treasures hidden among the ruins and soil of the Greek temples. In fact, England, France, Germany, and America established archaeological schools in Athens and divided the country among themselves.

The British never wanted an independent Greece. In the early nineteenth century, one of its looters, Lord Elgin, cut off the heart of Parthenon. This was the frieze of the temple showing the Panathenaea, Athenians’ athletic and cultural celebration of their divine protector, goddess Athena. The stolen Parthenon treasures are still in the British Museum and the British government refuses to return them to Greece.

Yet the British have a thriving archaeology school in Athens since 1886. Its archaeologists have been all over Greece: In the Aegean, the islands of Cyclades, Kea, Chios, and Melos; in the Ionian islands of Cythera, Ithaca; the two large islands of Euboea and Crete; and in the mainland, Central Greece, Macedonia, and Argolis and Sparta in Peloponnesos.

The United States has been digging the grounds of the Acropolis and the agora below the Acropolis, including the agora of ancient Corinth.

The Germans took over Olympia. They also have left their fingerprints in the choice archaeological history of the Ionian islands of Leukas and Ithaca, as well as Thebes, Orchomenos, Eleusis, Sparta, Argolis, and Kerameikos.

France established her foothold in Greece in 1846. This prize of being first in the ripe archaeology of Greece have paid rich dividends. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi in Central Greece has been the pride of French archaeologists. They have been excavating it for a century and a half. They know its history. French archaeologists have also left their mark in Macedonia, the Aegean island of Thasos and Samothrake, Delos, Cyclades, Crete, and Cyprus.

Greek archaeologists are trying monitoring these foreigners excavating the ancient Greek centers of civilization. However, Greece never had enough archaeologists and, like other scientists and bureaucrats, are underpaid. How are they to deal with much better paid and probable better equipped foreign archaeologists?

In addition to the large actors (US, UK, Germany, and France), there are Italians, Danish, Belgians, Irish, Australians, Polish, Norwegians, and Finnish digging in Greece. It’s practically impossible for Greek archaeologists to know what these dozens of foreigners do.

But there’s also a big political problem and a crisis sinking Greek archaeology and Greece. Since 2010, the country has been going through another fourth crusade. All the wealth of the country (including archaeological wealth) is under the control of the debt institutions of the European Union (EU) and the United States (International Monetary Fund, IMF). Under these dark-age conditions, Greek archaeologists become invisible.

The Greek Ministry of Culture, taking its orders from the new proconsuls of the IMF-EU, has been lending Greek treasures to foreign agents or countries for up to 50 years. This is the equivalent of trading Greece’s past for quick payments to lenders. And 50 years is a very long time. Who is going to be around in 50 years to make certain the Greek treasures are repatriated?

EU and IMF are slave masters. They have been enforcing an “austerity” of hunger and destitution in Greece. Under this foreign occupation, Greek archaeological treasures risk looting and disappearance from the country.

All the money Greek museums earn from the millions of visiting tourists go straight to Brussels and IMF.

End the protection for stolen Greek treasures

But there’s another foreign-inspired insult to Greek treasures shown in British, French, German, American or Russian museums and those of Greece. Foreigners have the audacity saying they own what they stole from Greece. And they have codified this theft into the international copyright law.

Writers like me who wish to reproduce an image of a Greek amphora kept, for instance, in a German museum must obtain a written permission from the very authorities responsible for the theft of that amphora.

I faced this offensive reality in writing my book on the Antikythera Mechanism. I had chosen about 200 illustrations but ended using about twenty. Greek museums follow the restrictive practices of the British Museum and the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

I certainly would like to see the return to Greece of all Greek treasures stolen from the country.

No more looting of Greek culture

Independent Greece should be independent enough to bring the looting and abuse of its archaeological treasures to an end. Start by renegotiating the rules governing the foreign archaeological schools in Athens. Their archaeologists may be decent human beings who don’t steal Greek treasures, though no one can speak about this with any certainty.

The foreign archaeological schools in Athens could become great assets to both Greece and Europe and America. They possess deep knowledge of Greek history and have valuable archaeological libraries. Foreign archaeologists have the opportunity to defend Greek civilization, thus reviving the nineteenth-century Philhellenism that was a powerful force in liberating both Greece and Europe from ignorance and hubris.

The new rules governing foreign archaeologists in Greece should be explicit that unless Greek archaeologists work together with their foreign archaeologists colleagues, those foreigners cannot work in Greece. And since EU-IMF impoverish the country, foreign governments wishing to maintain their archaeologists in Greece must fund the training and salaries of the Greek archaeologists.

No more orders from foreigners

Greece must terminate its subservience to EU-IMF. Stop debt payments and, if necessary, go back to the Greek drachma. Needless to say, any compromise the IMF-EU brought upon Greek archaeological treasures should be rectified immediately. No more lending of Greek archaeological treasures for more than five years.

Taking these steps requires courage. This courage and patriotism come from practicing Athenian direct democracy, not the model of representative-monarchical “democracy” modern Greece borrowed from the West. So, the Greeks have to undo lots of bad Western habits.

Peacemakers

They can declare their neutrality in the Ukraine war. Become the intermediary between Ukraine and Russia. The Greeks had centuries of intimate contact with both Russians and Ukrainians. Their first epic, Argonautika, was about the expedition of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece in Colchis, the Greeks’ Far East, today’s Georgia.

Free the images of Hellenic treasures

Time has come for Greece to reclaim its leading role in Western civilization. Teach the Euro-Americans a thing or two about the virtues of Hellenic culture.

Take to the international court foreign museums and private art collectors trading or displaying Greek archaeological treasures.

Make all the images of Greek archaeological treasures free to all writers and artists using them for educational purposes. Demand the reform or abolition of the copyright law on the ownership of Greek archaeological images.

Tell foreign scholars, who make a living by trading in fashionable multiculturalism at the expense of the integrity of Homer and other Hellenic thinkers, they are no longer welcomed to Greece.

The wisdom of Emperor Julian

Emperor Julian, 361-363, had the right advice to those teachers of Greek who feared the Greek gods in Homer. He ordered them quit or he forbade them from teaching Greek. But those scholars who loved Homer, could go on teaching Greek (The Letters of Julian 422.36).

It was inconceivable that a teacher reading Homer to students would hate the religion of Homer who more than any other Greek thinker embedded religion in his poems, so much so that to separate them (the Greek gods from the epic stories) would render the poems meaningless. Julian said you could not do that and be a teacher — unless the teacher had other purposes in mind, using Greek culture against itself, and mastering the grammatical architecture of Greek as a dead language removed from the ideas and civilization that gave it birth (Against the Galilaeans 39a-358e).

Similarly, modern scholars writing books against the Greeks don’t deserve respect or recognition or positions from which to corrupt students with pseudo theories they spawn against Homer or Plato or Aristotle.

The life-giving legacy of Greece

We need the ancient Greeks now more than ever before. We are engulfed by war, annihilating nuclear weapons, and a dark-age threatening climate chaos – all anthropogenic.

J. C. Stobart, British scholar and author of the extremely insightful and riveting book, The Glory that was Greece, had it right (1964 edition, pages 1, 3):

“[A]ll Western civilization has Greece for its mother and nurse… unless we know something about her [Hellas] our knowledge of the past must be built upon sand…. our art and literature has absorbed and assimilated what Greece had to teach… our roots are so entwined with the soil of Greek culture that we can never lose taste of it as long as books are read, and pictures painted. We are in fact, living on the legacy of Greece,” he wrote.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Now the crime committed by Sergio Moro and his supporters can no longer be unknown. So speaks the news in G1, which previously did not know about the barbarities against former president Lula:

“The United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee reported on Thursday (28) that former President Lula (PT) was not guaranteed a fair trial, privacy, with political rights violated in Operation Lava Jato.

The commission also considered that the ‘procedural violations’ of Lava Jato made ‘arbitrary the ban on Lula to run for president’. With this, the UN understood that there was a violation of the former president’s political rights, including the right to run for elections.”

A news of such importance, that should be read on TV like the narration of a free-kick goal by Juninho Pernambucano in a World Cup final, was read with the voice of someone announcing the death of Roberto Carlos. The voice was choked with grief and the face was raw with sorrow and pain. A tragedy. If she could, the reporter would speak like the Bolsonarists: this UN decision is yet another work of international communism.

But the crimes, committed by the then judge Sergio Moro and associated prosecutors, had long been under the noses of the press, who avoided the rotten smell of the trial phases. Nor did the eyes of the media see the invasions of privacy, eavesdropping on lawyers, leaks of intimate images and phrases of Lula. Nor did they hear the righteous words of the brilliant defense lawyers Cristiano Zanin and Valeska Martins. The commentators on television turned a deaf ear.

However, the bias, crime and corruption that the mediocre Sergio Morro claimed to fight, was already glaring here:

In 2018, Lula’s arrest was made under the sentence that he had corrupted himself with the receipt of a Tríplex, even with no proof that he owned it. The convicting sentence was so miserable of evidence, that paragraphs could be copied from anywhere in the document, and the result would be the same. The unreasonings were repeated or only the names of the whistleblowers changed. But always the samba note was one: one whistleblower declared, declared, declared, to infinity. There was “evidence” referring to e-mails, where Zeca Pagodinho meant Lula, Brahma was Lula, Boss was Lula, Madame was Dona Marisa. All the unreasonable reasoning was a labyrinth of comings and goings, backtracking, turns, of fixation in search of a single point: the condemnation of former President Lula.

This was the inquisition the last time Lula testified before the inquisitor of the Brazilian right wing:

“Moro – Mr. ex-president, can you clarify if there was an intention from the beginning to acquire a triplex in the building instead of a single unit?

Lula: There wasn’t at the beginning and there wasn’t at the end. I want to speak, because I have the right to speak that I didn’t request, receive, or pay for an apartment that they say is mine.

Moro: There was never the intention of acquiring this tríplex?

Lula: There was never the intention of acquiring the tríplex.

Moro: Here, you have an adhesion proposal, subject to approval, regarding the same property. This was signed by Mrs. Marisa Leticia, I’ll show it to you here.

Lula: When is this date here?

Moro: April 1, 2005. There is in this document, I don’t know if you have checked, an erasure. The number 174, corresponding to the tríplex in that same building, was erased and the number 141 was placed on top of it. This document that the Federal Police found to have been erased, do you know who erased it?

Lula: The Federal Police haven’t found out who did it? No. So when they find out, you can tell me, I want to know.

Moro: Here, there is an agreement for a three-bedroom duplex in this building in Guarujá, unit 174 A, which later became triplex 164 A when the development was transferred to OAS. Can I show you the document?

Lula: Signed by whom?

Moro: … The signature is blank…

Lula: Then you can keep it, please!

And with this evidence, finally, the judge gave the sentence: “I condemn Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva”.

About a corruption similar to that of Sergio Moro, who pretended morality, the great José Carlos Ruy well pointed out in Dicionário Machado de Assis:

“Nóbrega – He was an alms collector for the Church. He met Natividade and Perpétua in Rua de São José when they went to consult Bárbara. He kept the 2 thousand réis note that Natividade gave as alms. He applied and multiplied the money. A few months later, he stopped being an alms collector and changed careers. He left the city; when he returned, he had a couple of thousand contos de réis, which his fortune doubled, redoubled and tripled. He made money in speculation, in the ‘encilhamento’. He was someone else; his features were not the same, but the ones that time came to compose and improve him. (Esau and Jacob, 1904)”.

The brilliant Machado de Assis Dictionary, by José Carlos Ruy, is still waiting to be published by Editora Anita Garibaldi.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Urariano Mota.

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Recently, former Conservative cabinet minister Chris Alexander, New Brunswick education minister Dominic Cardy and former Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier have raised the idea of creating a “no-fly zone” (NFZ) over Ukraine. “We’re calling on all governments of the world to support creating a no fly zone over Ukraine,” declared Michael Shwec, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, at a rally in Montréal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Congressman Adam Kinzinger have also called for NATO to adopt a NFZ.

A NFZ over Ukraine means war with Russia. It would force the US or NATO to shoot down Russian planes.

A war between Russia and NATO would be horrendous. Both the US and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons. Highlighting the dangers, Paul Street wrote on Counterpunch that “any elected official calling for a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine should be forced to rescind that call or resign for advocating a policy that could lead to the end of human civilization.”

Fortunately, Canada’s defence minister Anita Anand and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki have rejected the idea of an NFZ. “It would essentially mean the US military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes,” said Psaki. “That is definitely escalatory, that would potentially put us in a place where we are in a military conflict with Russia. That is not something the president wants to do.”

Even when the target is not a nuclear power, Canadian-backed NFZs have created death, destruction and escalation. After killing thousands of Iraqis in 1991 the US, UK, France and Canada imposed a NFZ over northern and southern Iraq. Over the next 12 years US and British warplanes regularly bombed Iraqi military and civilian installations to enforce the NFZs.

On different occasions Canada sent naval vessels and air-to-air refueling aircraft to assist US airstrikes. Canadian air crew on exchange with their US counterparts also helped patrol the NFZs.

After a September 1996 US strike to further destroy Iraq’s “air-defence network” Prime Minister Jean Chretien said the action was “necessary to avert a larger human tragedy in northern Iraq.” Five years later Chretien responded to another bombing by stating, “if the Iraqis are breaking the agreement or what is the zone of no-flying, and they don’t respect that, the Americans and the British have the duty to make sure it is respected.”

Twelve years after enforcing the NFZs the US/UK launched a full-scale invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

In March 2011, Washington, Paris and some other NATO countries convinced the United Nations Security Council to endorse a plan to implement a NFZ over Libya (China, Germany, Russia, Brazil and Turkey abstained on the vote). Begun under the pretext of saving civilians from Muammar Gaddafi’s terror, the real aim was regime change. The UN “no-fly zone” immediately became a license to bomb Libyan tanks, government installations and other targets in coordination with rebel attacks. With a Canadian general leading the mission, NATO also bombed Gaddafi’s compound and the houses of people close to him. The military alliance defined “effective protection” of civilians as per the UN resolution, noted Professor of North African and Middle Eastern history Hugh Roberts, as “requiring the elimination of the threat, which was Gaddafi himself for as long as he was in power (subsequently revised to ‘for as long as he is in Libya’ before finally becoming ‘for as long as he is alive’).” Thousands, probably tens of thousands, died directly or indirectly from that conflict. Libya has yet to recover and the conflict spilled south into the Sahel region of Africa.

While they may sound benign, NFZs have generally elicited violence. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a terrible violation of international law that is likely to have deleterious consequences for years to come. But escalating the conflict through a no-fly zone will only make it worse. It could lead to a cataclysmic nuclear war.

• On March 4 I will be participating in a panel on “Cutting through the Spin: Russia’s invasion, NATO’s provocation and Canada’s complicity”. 

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.