Can there be an adequate response to the most pressing challenges facing humanity — war, the destruction of the earth, and AI?
Most people, wherever they fall on the political spectrum, deeply agree with this perception:
“Something has to give. Our establishment, it seems, has become a death cult.”
That’s a Brit talking about the United Kingdom’s establishment, not an American talking about the American system. The military-industrial complex needs war like a junkie needs smack, despite “devastating other societies, destabilizing the world, squandering our own resources, killing and maiming our young working-class men and leaving us less safe.”
But as a local fellow, echoing the self-defeating sentiment of most Americans, said to me recently: “You can’t do anything about it.”
It’s said that context is everything, but what is the context when the same mentality and the same crises apply interchangeably between nations?
The Israeli-American aerial attacks on Iran have spawned a regional war with tremendous global ramifications. For one thing, the ecological crisis that had already reached tipping points before this insane war is being greatly exacerbated by it.
Even so, “thought leaders” insist on thinking first in terms of their nations. For example, is this writer speaking about British or American citizens and their leaders: “Our elites remain immune to the common sense of the [American or British] public, which only underlines that they have forfeited their right to rule?”
So it’s not just Trump’s White House that increasingly resembles a madhouse; it’s the world generally. Viewing the polycrisis in terms of national borders contributes to every facet of it.
We must rethink context, and rethink democracy. The context is humankind, and without radical change, democracy has become unfit even for national use.
Overwhelmed by the scale of the human crisis, people all over the world are falling back into a tribalistic mentality that is generating authoritarianism.
George W. Bush’s crude maxim for the Iraq war of “for us or against us” is inherent to one degree or another when one thinks in terms of national borders. Yet pundits and editors continue to reinforce the atavistic need for enemies, with articles such as, “Britain’s enemy is now Donald Trump.”
This isn’t “Trump’s war on the world,” as shallow minds insist. It cannot even be reduced to America and Israel’s war on Iran. Netanyahu and Trump are merely manifestations, like Putin, of the world’s most malevolent leaders.
It’s purblind to imply that the Gulf Arabs and the global economy were doing fine until these two supreme conduits of collective darkness attacked Iran. Things were not progressing in any positive direction before this madness was unleashed, and they will not return to any semblance of normality when the Donald’s whim turns elsewhere.
Progressives and the lamestream media keep denying that in a democracy (even dying democracies like the United States and Israel), the buck doesn’t stop at the president’s or prime minister’s desk; it stops with the people. Otherwise, we don’t have a Republic.
That may be the fact now, but the Israeli people still bear responsibility for overwhelmingly supporting their warmongering leadership, while the American people bear responsibility for not giving a damn, despite what the talking heads on cable TV say.
The notion that “Trump must now face prosecution by the International Criminal Court for atrocities perpetrated in Iran” is by orders of magnitude less likely than Netanyahu will ever stand before the ICC for the war crimes he’s charged with.
More to the point, the international order has collapsed, and “international law” has been proven to be the fig leaf it always was. Even more risible is the hope that “all governments that still respect the UN charter” will step forth behind a toothless United Nations.
Even the clearest thinkers cannot bring themselves to leave the muddled waters of nationalism. It isn’t just about “a state that has committed genocide – Israel – joining forces with an ailing superpower led by an aspiring autocrat,” when the 17th century nation-state system itself is dangerously defunct.
The mentality that engendered both world wars prevails with idiocy like, “The US, an outlaw state like Israel, is a hostile power that fundamentally threatens the UK, and Trump and his administration must now be considered an enemy.”
To prattle on about “actions that adversely affect the British people and the British state” is to feed the nationalism that gives rise to this and all wars.
People who talk about “the national interest” need to be called out for underwriting the very wars that they decry. National interest has become a law of the jungle anachronism in a globalized world necessitating a global order after the collapse of the international order.
It’s not only “this destructive, un-thought-through US-Israeli regression into the worst excesses of imperialist vandalism that crushes hopes of peaceful change,” but people who persist in thinking/feeling in terms of the nation-state.
It’s true that “the existential threat to democratic values, laws and freedoms posed by Trump, Netanyahu and authoritarian bedfellows such as Vladimir Putin is ubiquitous — and growing.” But it’s mindless to hearken back to 1776 and call for a “British declaration of independence.”
Bringing about a psychological revolution becomes more urgent by the day.
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