Didn't Like 'The Last Jedi'? You Might Be An Unpatriotic Russian Troll Undermining American Democracy ... Apparently

There is an anecdote about how, in Stalin era USSR, everything would somehow be blamed on Trotsky. Soviet economy didn't meet 5 year plan output targets? Trotsky's fault. Collectivization of agriculture has unintended effects on food supply? Trotsky's fault. Building collapses? Trotsky's fault. Factory machinery stops working? Trotsky's fault. Fall down the stairs? Trotsky's fault. Etc.

Now, as applies developments in the USA, it may be said that a similar pattern appears in evidence.

You didn't like the latest Star Wars films? Russian hacker's fault.

Criticizing The Last Jedi online is, it would seem, an unpatriotic act. You *dare* to feel that the plot's a bit wtf perhaps due to the studio having other priorities - and worse, to express these views on social media? YOU ARE UNDERMINING THE VERY FABRIC OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, CITIZEN.

I'm not even kidding. This is *actually* what is being said.

To be sure, it is not exactly a new thing in the 'popular culture' and 'creative' industries - when an audience doesn't respond positively (or, perhaps, as ebulliently positively as some might like) to a work, to declare that it is because they "don't get it". That they are, perhaps, "unworthy" of what has been placed in front of them, and lacking in whatever critical faculty of discernment is apparently required to see the masterpiece fo what it "truly" is.

Although I cannot help but note that that is *also* how the "new clothes" are sold to a certain Emperor in the old children's story. [replete with, as almost invariably gets left out, the corresponding 'aesop' at the end, where the child who dares to disrespect royalty by pointing out he's buffoonishly naked in public, is imprisoned for that most turgid crime of speaking the truth - and especially where others may perhaps dare to hear it and respond accordingly].

Yet this is not even at the level of that famed maxim of Bertolt Brecht - the one about how, if 'the People' have lost the Confidence of their Government ... it would perhaps be simpler to simply dissolve 'the People' and elect another than to get the government in question to change course.

For this is not a case of a great artist losing confidence in his audience, for being lacking in quality and taste.

But rather, a fairly explicit statement that if you don't just meekly go along both in thought and in word and 'declaratory' deed with the Company Line (whether this 'company' is Disney or the Democrats) ... that you are a subversive! That you are a traitor! And worse than that - that you are either *directly* in league, in cahoots with the dastardly '"post"-Communist' ideological enemy across the sea ... or you are *actually* an unperson. Simply some sock account or automated troll-bot, whose genuine opinion can be safely ignored or actively weaponized against what you support. That most supreme of 'de-legitimations' - being reduced from 'personhood' to some ungainly combination of 'marionette' and 'clockwork'.

And all of this, over a cash-in film trilogy intended to appeal to children and aging nerds with a surplus of disposable income for the TIE-in marketing.

The next step, of course, will be the targeting and identification of these "subversives" - those who have already *dared* to implicitly sabotage a Hillary Clinton 2020 Presidential Run by expressing unfavourable opinion about a forgettable movie three years before.

After all - if it is easier to believe that the problem lies with the intended audience rather than the 'product' [whether a film or an extensively/excessively choreographed and staged political candidacy], then considering the significant numbers involved, it is far easier again to believe that the 'problem' more pointedly lies with entities not even really *part* of the 'intended audience' - yet who nevertheless exert a most malefic and difficult to counter psychic influence over those you covet in support.

With the insidiously broad scope and spectrum of who is liable to be subpoenaed and hauled in for questioning in the context of Congressional and FBI probes into alleged "Russian interference" in the *last* Presidential election ... it would perhaps be sensible to suggest to ordinary Americans on social media that they consider adopting, for their own safety, the advisory maxim indigenous to Stalinist Russia:

"First, do not think. If you think, do not speak. If you speak, do not write. If you write - do not publish. If you publish, do not, whatever you do, sign/do so under your own name.

And if you *do* publish under your own name ...

... don't be surprised."  

A Modest Proposal For Russia's Response To Israel In The Wake Of An F-16

So now the dust (or, perhaps, some measure of the 'fog of war') is starting to clear over Monday's events in Syria, it's probably prudent to reflect on what Putin can and should do in response to what has occurred.

At this stage, and especially given Russia's previously positive relationship with Israel, the "right" being reserved here is very unlikely to include direct military action.

But before I put forward what I have in mind instead of this, let us briefly parse the likely course of events which have lead us to this point:

Everybody agrees that on Monday evening, four Israeli F-16s carried out a missile-strike against Syrian targets in Latakia; and that in the course of this, a Russian electronic reconnaissance plane - an IL-20 - was shot down over the Mediterranean.

American media accounts have tended to basically stop there, except to occasionally add that it seems likely that Syrian air-defences were directly responsible for the shooting down of the IL-20.

As it happens, Russian Defence Ministry statements have confirmed this - noting that it appears that a Syrian S-200 SAM was indeed what brought down the IL-20. However, they have also stated, and at this stage there appears no reason to disbelieve them, that the Israelis deliberately took advantage of the IL-20's radar profile to provide cover for their incoming F-16s.

Now, an IL-20 is a pretty massive aircraft. It's roughly thirty six meters long, with a thirty seven meter wingspan; and would have represented the single largest object in the sky at that point, with its turboprop-derived lower speed and regular figure-of-eight flight-path making for a pretty predictable source of screening.

A further piece of evidence in support of this contention, is that the Israelis only sought to notify the Russians of their operation ... approximately one minute before the commencement of hostilities.

This matters; as it is a considerable break from how the Israelis have handled the previous two hundred or so airstrikes they've carried out in Syria over the past year and a half - wherein in order to avoid exactly these sorts of incidents, they've given the Russians ample warning of any intended Israeli air-incursion.

The strong implication, here, then, is that the lack of notice which would have allowed the Russians to get their plane out of the line of fire, was very much deliberate on the Israeli part. And given the periodic successes of Syrian S-200 systems against Israeli jets in recent months (including at least one instance earlier this year involving an F-16 that the Israelis have been forced to admit occurred), it is perhaps not hard to see why.

It is unclear at this stage just what the French frigate also in the area was firing at; or whether it was operating in co-ordination with the IDF.

In any case, the Syrians proceeded to do exactly what one would expect - and, for that matter, what they are completely entitled to do: they attempted to defend their airspace and their nation from the Israeli sortie, by firing back.

This evidently included the use of an S-200 system - a comparatively antiquated Soviet-made surface-to-air missile first designed in the 1960s, and supplied to Syria by the USSR from the 1980s, with sporadic modernization and maintenance occurring with Russian assistance over the last three years.

Now, *in theory*, the IFF (Identify Friend-or-Foe) tagging system would have made it less likely for the IL-20 to be hit by an S-200, not least due to the Russian/Soviet manufacture of both pieces of hardware. But "theory" is a fine work of fiction when it comes to actual battlefield conditions; and evidently this has not worked out in practice - perhaps due to the IFF system aboard the IL-20 being turned off (it is, after all, a reconnaissance plane), or maybe due to incomplete informational sharing between Russian and Syrian forces. It's also probably worth noting that the S-200 has a rather notoriously 'spotty' record anyway in this department - with a Ukranian S-200 system in 2001 having managed the supposedly 'impossible' feat of taking down a Soviet-made TU-154M civilian airliner 250km away from the S-200's designated target during the course of military exercises, as a result of the missile autonomously attaining a new target lock upon the airliner once it lost its original target, despite (according to the Ukranian Defence Ministry, at any rate) an IFF system and on-board self-destruct which should have prevented this from happening. It is certainly possible that something like this has occurred with regard to the downed IL-20. Namely, that an S-200 either inadvertently locked onto the IL-20 once it was no longer under human targeting control; or alternatively, that the S-200 was initially locked on an Israeli F-16, and upon losing that target due to Israeli countermeasures or evasive maneuvers, instead re-acquired a new target in the form of the IL-20 rather than simply self-destructing. However it transpired, it is a tragedy. And, worse than that, an eminently *avoidable* one. Rendered all the more lamentable by the fact that the Russian crew were in Syria to assist in the eradication of dangerous extremists - while the Israelis who ultimately spelled their doom were over Syrian airspace in order to *help* those self-same extremists through strikes against their opponents. We used to 'joke' that it was not accurate to suggest ISIS and Al-Nusra lacked an airforce - as they had the IDF. This does not seem something to laugh about, now. Anyway, having dissected in a limited way the likely course of events on Monday evening, this now capaciously informs the likely solutions going forward and from the Russian perspective. It would seem that there were two significant contributory factors here: i) the Israeli 'bad-faith' abrogation of the proper protocols for communication between themselves and the Russian Military, in order to attain a deliberate advantage for carrying out their attack; and ii) the regrettable features of outmoded air-defence hardware which ultimately lead to the shoot-down. The solution to the second issue is rather straightforward: Russia had earlier proposed selling S-400 systems to Syria - a move which wound up effectively 'veto'd' by Israel stating in no uncertain terms that they would carry out airstrikes against any such systems before they had been fully installed, regardless of whether they were still Russian crewed at that point. Given Israeli airstrikes are presently causing Russian casualties anyway; as well as the fact that the Russians have already had their own advanced SAM systems for *Russian* defence set up in Syria for some time now, in the present situation of Israeli diplomatic weakness created by Monday's events, now is the ideal time to engage in such technology-transfer directly to Syria with an explicit view to ensuring that Monday's events do not recur thanks to half-century old hardware malfunctioning. The first issue is much more complex, as I would be rather surprised if Russia genuinely wanted to seriously contemplate abandoning its significantly close relationship with Israel - although it may potentially be convinced to 'downgrade' it somewhat, assuming that we do not see a repeat of what happened following Turkey's downing of a Russian military aircraft in 2015 (ironically, a seeming catalyst for the two countries beginning to work more closely together than ever before). Whether Russia chooses to remain on 'friendly' 'terms with Israel in a militaristic sense or not, the plain reality is that the Israelis have demonstrated that they cannot and should not be trusted to behave in an up-front manner when it comes to the communication and co-ordination protocols essential to allowing them to continue to operate with relative impunity above Syrian airspace. Russia should therefore suspend this facility they have provided to the Israelis forthwith - and openly state that future instances of Israeli military aircraft turning up unannounced above Syria will simply be treated as hostile, and dealt with accordingly. After all, from the perspective of that IL-20 crew, what else characterizes the Israeli conduct than this designation? Certainly not the actions of something approaching a 'trusted' ally! The net effect of this would be to impose a 'no-fly zone' of sorts over Syria - thus allowing operational freedom for Russian and Syrian air assets, and denying precious, vital air-cover to the extremist forces which theoretically everybody agrees need to be wiped out. I am aware, of course, that a Russia-provided no-fly zone in this way would form an ironic (and unquestionably improved!) 'echo' of the NATO no-fly zone imposed upon Libya during the ouster of Gaddafi, as well as the no-fly zone which former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seeking to have imposed upon Syria not so long ago. But that is the case with 'mirror images' - everything in them is 'the other way around'; and so, in this instance, it would be to the welcome relief of the host-nation and positive contribution to a safe outcome to a conflict. Not, as ultimately resulted from the NATO intervention in Libya, or would unquestionably have occurred had Clinton gotten her way, a neo-imperialist ploy to ably assist ISIS et co. The coming days will, no doubt, demonstrate that Putin and those working for him in Russia's foreign and defensive ministries, are both more creative and more perspicacious than I in these matters. I shall await with great interest their ultimate decision as to the appropriate response here. But it seems plainly apparent to me that the hitherto-current approach - of Russia attempting to treat Israel as a potential friend and even ally, whether geopolitically, or in the specific conflict against extremist forces in the Middle-East - has demonstrably not 'delivered the goods'; and needs to be reviewed with the goal of providing greater assistance and credence to those forces such as the Iranian, Syrian, and Hezbollah military arms *actually* doing much of the fighting - not coincidentally, the exact same forces which Israel seems year in and year out most hell-bent on annihilating where possible. Indeed, some might say that unless and until the Israelis can demonstrate a genuine commitment to attacking rather than assisting the *real* adversary in Syria - that they should perhaps be treated, in exactly that light, as part and parcel with them, and shunned in a similar manner.

Jihad Vs McLanguage

Over the past year or two, I've endeavoured to popularize the concept of "Jihad Vs McWorld". If you want a really tangible demonstration of "McWorld" in action, look no further than the McDonalds workplace policy brought to light by Newshub this evening - wherein Maori staff responding to Maori customers attempting to place an order in Te Reo Maori, was firmly clamped down upon by McDonalds' management, on grounds that "English is our McLanguage" .

It is no coincidence that McDonalds has declared English to be its "McLanguage". Rather than, say, the 'lingua franca' of its day-to-day interior operations.

The very concept of "McWorld" is the homogenization, the monolithicization of human diversity - the reduction of the spectrum of human cultures and customs down to easily commodifiable and capitalistically, neoliberalistically exploitable kernels.

On a trite level, I suppose you could say that it's the replacement of genuine Kiwi cuisine with the "KiwiBurger" - an item of culinary cardboard fundamentally the same (possibly minus the egg) as the Australian burger McDonalds marketed in *that* country as something distinctively "Oz".

And if all it is, this "McWorld", this "McLanguage" concept, was the endeavour to appeal to soft-pap simulacra-patriotism when entrepreneurially exploiting the hunger of the masses ... then that would perhaps be one thing. A 'bait-and-switch' carried out with beetroot in a burger.

But that is not at all what we have here.

Instead, it is the concerted effort to expunge the very realities of being 'human' [one of which, of course, is that there is no 'singular' reality of humanity - and instead many and various different heritages, perspectives, and other nexes of peoples worth preserving within their own spheres] in favour of increasingly incredibly bland vague platitudes.

"Ananda?" No, we won't have any of that. Simply be "happy" - as in "happy meal". An emotional stimuli inculcated into us since childhood via the mediums of birthday parties and made-in-China toys-of-the-week. A commodified 'feeling', that has as much resemblance to actual "happiness" and contentment as a cheeseburger does to promoting [stomach-]fullness and dietary health.

Your own language, culture, and customs? Nah, can't have that. Gets in the way of the verisimilitude. Management might have to learn some new words, and Marketing might need to put a bit more effort in. And in any case, a 'distinctive' people, who remain 'disconnected' from the "realities" of corporate-carbon 'consumerhood' as the highest expression and authenticity of 'being' - are a harder market to crack and profit-maximize on anyway.

Now, to be sure, this phenomenon is not entirely sui generis. The rapacious history of colonial-cultural exploits includes quite the array of previous comparable instances to draw from.

We could talk about the Macauley educational pogrom (it seems altogether too 'sanitized' to simply call it a 'programme') in British India - wherein the Brits decided that the key to turning the Indian peoples into pliant, pliable subordinates of Empire meant attempting to rob them of their own ancestral heritages and traditional sources of knowledge, languages, means of instruction and other nexes of nascent identity for the young.

In their place, substituting a very much 'English' educational impetus - replete with the trashing of Sanskrit-derived literature in favour of Jane Austen.

The impacts of that most egregious act of wilful attempted civilizational vandalism continue to be felt to this day, in India. Even despite Independence being achieved, there remains a certain curtailment of the permeation of pre-British Indian culture and heritage within India itself as a result - more than a hundred and fifty years after the fact!

This, arguably, is the *nicer iteration* of the fate which awaits any nation - any people, any ethnos, any tradition - which is insufficiently prepared and On Guard to ward off the pernicious permutations of what I suppose we may have to start calling [oxymoronic in the extreme though it might be] "McCulture".

But if there are not overwhelming differences of 'kind' between this 'Macaulayism' and latter-day McWorldism [perhaps we shall soon see 'McMacaulayism' as a 'term of (mc)art' ] , there are nevertheless distinctions of degree which may render McWorld-ism in some parts *worse* - due to its very banality.

I mean, I do not *at all* approve of what is entailed by Macaulayism. Do not get me wrong. But there is a qualitative difference between English, as the language of Shakespeare - and utilized in the engagement with same - versus what I unheartily expect that "English is our McLanguage" presumably entails.

In that regard, this "McLanguage" concept most likely represents an unutterable act of vandalism not just against the non-corporate(//-)metropole cultures it seeks to (neo-)colonize and vanquish - but against the very cultures and language which somehow inadvertently gave it birth in the first place.

McLanguage - and therefore, by extension, McWorld - is therefore a virus, a parasite. Something that is inculcated into a 'host', via a 'carrier' [funnily enough often from thirty thousand feet, so to speak; or perhaps launched off a rather more literal 'carrier' somewhere offshore, in either case to make the way for what comes next] , and which then begins the drawn out process of drawing and quartering its new bio-cultural environment until it has simply remade itself, over and over and over, and sought to most successfully repress anything *not* of itself which might plausibly thus resist it (or - 'worse' - allow others to organize to do the same).

That is why 'McLanguage' (again, not my term - literally McDonalds' own word from their own policy and internal propaganda documents, issued in the form of poster-mounted commands to workers) and McWorld are so viciously, vigorously, vitriolically, vindictively *opposed* to the yet-remaining instances of Human distinctiveness, cultural diversity - actually-existing Nationalism that cannot be suborned into simply another 'human face' for neoliberal 'civilizational'-tier nightmare.

Because *those* things - those sacred, important, autochthonous, above all *genuine* things - are the bulwarks, the tools, the floodgates, the ramparts, the *weapons* via which "McWorld" can yet still be meaningfully opposed.

And through such, reminding people - people*s*, in fact, in the definite plural of pluralities - who they *actually* are.

It is no coincidence, either, that successful anti-/de-colonial projects have historically functioned on exactly this basis.

The only difference there, then, was that the subject-peoples [in both senses of the term - albeit the latter only realized in the progression of time once they had successfully reclaimed some measure of agency from the mire of 'object'-ification *as* 'subjects' of Empire] *knew* who The Enemy was, and how to fight him.

Today, we are implicitly, effectively, living in a world ruled by a Clown ; and just as Ronald McDonald hides behind Mayor McCheese in the exercise of temporal power - far too many people today remain patently unaware of this intransigent, indolent fact.

The waging of 'Jihad' against McWorld, then, requires the deployment of potent ideological weapons - one of the most important and significant of which being the very idea that there is a War going on in the first place.

And the second, perhaps, being that the 'tools' with which we fight the clown-faced oppressor - those of our own language, heritage, culture, religion, tradition, (communication/confirmation), .. and yes, actually, 'cuisine', also - are not simple 'weapons' of 'memetic warfare'. But are instead, *also* the effective building blocks, the skeletal - spinal - and nervous structure for the World, the Worlds, That Is To Come , next.

So with that in mind ... celebrate your own culture; reconnect with your own heritage; and tangibly reject the globalism - not least by "work[ing] as if you lived in the early days of a better nation".

Short of imitating the example of anguished Serbians against Belgrade's only McDonalds immediately following the outbreak of NATO's air-war against their country; or perhaps more recently, the closing down of symbolic McDonalds outlets in Moscow by the Russian state ... that is what we can do. What we *must* do.

Fortunately for us, as far as actions against the McWorld go - whether physical or metaphysical - these are unquestionably some of the most potent!

108/1008 THE DHARMA-YUDDHA IS IN MOTION!!!

Plaudits For Law-Change Free Prison Muster Reduction

I note with some interest a piece from yesterday's Herald, observing the positive results of a series of changes that have lead to somewhere between six hundred and a thousand New Zealanders fewer being incarcerated unnecessarily.

Now, without going into too much detail as to what's changed and how - this has not actually involved any alterations in the law around parole, bail, or anything of that nature. But rather, a set of fixes to issues which fell 'between the cracks' of existing policy - and which had lead to these aforementioned numbers of Kiwis being placed in prison when they otherwise, by rights, would not have been.

The actual nature of these changes were succinctly summed up by Corrections' National Deputy Commissioner, Leigh Marsh, as being "embarrassingly simple" fixes; which took as their baseline actually listening to front-line staff across the Corrections, Justice, and policing portfolios in order to try and sort out some of the "madness" (again, a quote from Marsh) of the previous status quo.

["Status Quo", as Ronald Reagan pithily observed, being Latin for "the mess we're in [currently]"]

I am sure that the reaction from some quarters is going to be howls of protest about how this makes ordinary New Zealanders more unsafe through having hundeds of additional hardened criminals wandering the streets.

Yet the plain reality is, once again, that under our current laws, *none* of these Kiwis who've been spared incarceration as a result of these changes, would actually have been jailed had 'the system' been working properly in the first place.

A similar note of disquiet can and should be sounded about the ongoing opposition of the reforming of our bail laws to do something about the - again, hundreds - of New Zealanders who find themselves incarcerated on remand, especially for relatively less serious crimes, only to come out following their day in court declared an innocent man; or guilty, but sentenced only to a far lesser punishment.

It is worrying in the extreme that a situation of unjust imprisonment may be welcomed 'just because' it may make somebody else feel a little bit safer - indeed, it is tantamount to starting down the greased incline of asking whether certain segments of the population ought be 'walled off' for the general protection of the rest of us even regardless of whether they've actually been proven to have committed any crime.

(That said, I do have a vague soft-spot for the idea of ring-fencing parts of Remuera and cutting off their access to global financial markets and tax-accountants to see if it lessens the chances of both white collar crime and more general economic vandalism occurring in the wider country ... but another punitive policy-set for another time).

The sheer simplicity of these 'fixes', and their demonstrably substantial impact (last month's NZ prisoner muster was ~10,205 - meaning that the reductions in inmate numbers these shifts in policy has achieved range from about five to just under ten percent of our overall prison population), suggests that they should have taken place years ago.

That said, the fact they did not would appear to indicate that one of two (possibly both at once) things has happened.

Either a) National and its various Ministers to have held the portfolio, were incompetent. That is to say, despite Bill English's declaration of our prison system and our country's massive incarceration rate to be "a moral and fiscal failure", it never occurred to anybody in power at any point over the past nine years, to stop and realize these problems - these *easily solvable problems - existed. Or, given the habitual Nat management strategy, to allow or otherwise empower their various underlings to come up with the solutions so that they might more deftly take credit for them.

Alternatively - and I suspect that this is vastly more likely - b) National and its various Ministers to have held the portfolio (including one Judith Collins, in what appears some sort of inverse, ironic, contrapasso of the damned) *were* at least vaguely aware, or should have been, of these ongoing issues and the ease with which they might be sorted ... and *consciously* (or, at absolute best, wilfully negliglently/recklessly) chose to do nothing about them. For the simple reason that for a certain portion (although not everybody) of the "law and order" crowd - escalating prison numbers mean axiomatically safer communities, and that the police, courts, government ... society at large .. is somehow doing its (various) job(s) properly.

High prison muster figures, therefore, are thought to be akin to a notable budgetary surplus, so to speak, when it comes to courting those people and their votes.

(There is a separate rant about the frank bizarreness of endeavoring to run a surplus in the midst of a recession, despite a historically low cost of crown borrowing, and accomplished via a studious string of cap-handed cuts to essential services and vandalism of a well-earning asset portfolio ... but that is, again, another immanent critique of the previous round of 'Status Quo', for another time)

Criminal justice policy, along with creationism in school science lessons, is one of those curious areas of the socio-political landscape wherein otherwise seemingly rational and indeed intelligent people start abandoning their critical faculties in a bid to make the loudest emotive arguments and the swiftest progress to a state possibly adjacent to that of Texas.

It is refreshing, indeed, therefore, to have made such a shift from a situation wherein Corrections was being presided over by a Minister who thought that prison-rape would be a desirable deterrent element against future offending, through to more reasonable figures capable of looking at the sector through the lense of 'lives' rather than 'votes'.

Let's see if this trend continues with the reception to some of Andrew Little's proposed further reforms in this area :P

'Rendezvous' With The Atlanticist-Al-Qaeda Pact in Yemen

He is perhaps little known in New Zealand today, but one of our most prominent 'exports' in a previous age was the cartoonist David Low. A satirist's worth can be measured by how much he manages to upset those he is satirizing, and how far he shocks an otherwise pliant public into re-examining its own pre-existing prejudices. 

On these dual scores, Low was undeniably a success - not only meriting official censorship in the Fascist countries he so frequently targeted, but finding himself marked for apprehension and likely execution in the event of a German invasion of Britain. While in terms of the British reading public, finding himself simultaneously derided as lacking patriotism for his anti-jingoistic depiction of "Colonel Blimp", and as a belligerent warmonger for his merciless commentaries on the Interwar policy of "Appeasement" towards Nazi Germany. 

Truly, the 'sweet spot' for those of us engaged in the (geo-)political commentary business is when we are attracting flakk from all sides! For then we are, perhaps, telling the truth without fear nor favour, in a manner unpalatable to each and every of those who would much rather it remain pleasingly obscured. 

And while there are any number of seriously excellent Low cartoons which spring instantly to mind when I think upon him - many of which heroically characterize, indeed .. movingly anthropomorphize .. the 'Blitz Mentality', the Dunkirk Spirit etc. in a way that cannot help but bring a tear to my eye - what conjured itself from my memory this week was another of Low's pictorial efforts. 

Entitled "Rendezvous", it depicts the tangible results of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as applies Poland. Meeting atop a face-down corpse in Polish Army uniform, Hitler and Stalin cordially greet one another with courteous bow and doffing of caps - while nevertheless maintaining the pretentious charade that they are indeed enemies.

Says Hitler to Stalin: "The Scum of the Earth, I believe?" 
Stalin to Hitler: "The Bloody Assassin of the Workers, I presume?"

All smiles, all charm, all mutually pursued and eventuated interests. 

Now, this is not intended to be a piece attacking the Soviet Union (or, for that matter, Germany) for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. There is a quite a fascinating article (which is, again, not this one) detailing the lengthy and mutually fruitful history of German-Soviet co-operation against the 'Liberal' West, from the Treaty of Rapallo onwards; and especially given the Anglosphere's strenuous opposition to and ongoing interference in Soviet internal affairs from the Revolution onward, such an accomodation should not perhaps be looked upon as nearly as surprising in its then-present context as it inevitably now appears. 

But the reason for Low's "Rendezvous" cartoon turning up with such force in my mind's eye in recent days, was my reading of the outcome of an AP investigation showing that the US-Saudi coalition active in Yemen against the Houthis - has, in point of fact, been rather actively co-operating with Al Qaeda and affiliates. 

This should not in any way come as a surprise. As we have seen in Syria, the Atlanticist axis has absolutely zero problem working with those who they otherwise decry (and righteously so - in rhetoric, at least) as "the scum of the earth". Israel's working with Al-Nusra because of that network's shared opposition to Syria and Iran is a lavish case in point. 

And given the US-Saudi - or, should I say, the Saudi-Israeliya - shared paranoia about Iranian influence, and a Yemen which is genuinely free and out from under the Saudi thumb, we should find it entirely unsurprising that they have absolutely zero issue collaborating with Sunni / Wahhabi extremists against Shi'ite reasonable men. 

But it genuinely infuriates me, that we see all of this rhetoric - all of these ranting, inchoate statements - from various figures active in the US and Israeli and other 'Western' politics, about Iran HAVING to be opposed, because they are allegedly "Islamic Extremists" or "State Sponsors of Terrorism" ... when these aforementioned countries, their clandestine and Neocon-aligned Deep States see no problem with actively colluding with the ACTUAL and real Islamic Extremists, and themselves becoming the State Sponsors of Terrorism instead. 

Nietzsche once wrote something about those who fight monsters having to take care lest they turn into monsters. He neglected to add that those who fight heroes - for such, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranians, the Russians, and others most assuredly are - can far more inevitably find THEMSELVES turning into Monsters. 

The relevancy for that David Low cartoon for this situation should prove capaciously obvious. 

Although, now that I think upon it, there is one absolutely key difference.

Namely, in the "Rendezvous" illustration, both Hitler and Stalin are posed over a deceased and functionally 'erased' figure representing the now-dead dream of an independent Poland. 

Whereas, in these situations I am talking about in the contemporary Middle East ... the Americans, Saudis, and Israelis - along with their apparent Al Qaeda (et co) allies - are not posed over a dead-and-dessicated national liberation cause. Nor are they cheerily greeting each other in the jubilance of victory. 

Rather, they are nervously glancing at one another, contemplating what they shall have to do next in the series of ever-escalating quasi-clandestine unprincipled actions evidently required to desperately shore up their regional (and global) hegemony. 

Meanwhile, more people continue to read the facts - despite the various efforts by certain states and platforms to make it more difficult for outlets like Fort Russ to get the word out - and come to the inevitable conclusion as to just who MUST be supported in these regional conflicts. 

Come to think of it, that puts me in the mind of another David Low cartoon.

That one's called "ALL BEHIND YOU, WINSTON".

"...And That's How You Get Nazis" - The Polish Example

"We went to WAR to protect Freedom of Speech!"

Gosh, that's a funny way to say "to protect the territorial integrity of Poland".

Now, Interwar Poland was not exactly a bastion of freedom of speech. In fact, the Sanation regime appeared to almost make a virtue out of the targeted repression of freedom of speech and of the press for groups - whether opposition, ethnic, or political minority - which it disagreed with.

But what I find interesting about this situation is the particular effect which the above had on the fledgling Polish state's German minority.

Namely, the ways in which it a) made it more difficult for ordinary Polish-Germans to protest against maltreatment and marginalization in the context of the Polish state; while b), and partially as a result of this, pushing many Germans in Poland to identify more strongly with the politics of a certain party which had just swept to success earlier in the decade in Poland's westward neighbour, if you get my drift.

That is to say, the situation of repression lead to an array of people not otherwise necessarily favourably disposed toward engagement with 'extreme' politics ... and in this particular case, literal Naziism ... to do so; as this was perceived as one of the only remaining "strong" forces capable of pushing back against said perceived repression. Eventually, this culminated in an array of what you might call 'anti-state' activities, of a rather militant nature ... followed by the invasion of Poland near the end of the decade, which triggered the British/Commonwealth/French declarations of War against Germany.

Now, I am not seeking to suggest that the above is a template for what may occur here in New Zealand if we see an escalation in the frequency and 'forcefulness' with which some elements endeavour to constrain (justifiably or otherwise) 'freedom of speech'. I hardly need to start listing the significant differences between Poland in the 1930s and New Zealand today which help to support the statement "It Can't Happen Here" as applied to our context.

Yet it seems a curious thing. Over the last two weeks .. and before that, for much of the last two to three years, we have heard all manner of strident rhetoric about if we *don't* assent to constraining 'freedom of speech' (whether through calls to "punch a Nazi" (with "Nazi", of course, being sufficiently vaguely defined as to be almost as meaningless a term in 'real-life' pugilistic-psephological discourse as it is on the internet), or the more recent endeavours to bar writing critical of the Neoliberal-Neoconservative (geo-)political consensus which pervades the Anglosphere (seriously - I was stunned to hear from an associate visiting the UK that he could not access my work in that country because their government had blocked it), or much of the rest of it ...) ..

... then "that's how you get Nazis" - in the sense that presumably all that's standing between your average, ordinary voter and full-on Hugo Boss uniforms alongside really bad misunderstandings of Indo-European anthropology ... is that they apparently haven't read a bit of 'fake news' on the internet yet.

But as the above-referenced episode from Polish history may show, there is a distinctly non-zero chance that in the manner common to so many prophecies found in the corpus of Greek Myth - that efforts to *prevent* a particular outcome can very well, and *very directly* foster its "(eventual) occurrence.

Or, in other words: what if these "anti-Nazi" measures are, in point of fact, at least occasionally "how you get Nazis"?

What's Really Behind American Threats Against India

You know, it is a curious thing. When Pakistan made moves about potentially acquiring Russian-made S-400 anti-missile/anti-air system … there was, largely, silence. Yet when India goes to actualize acquisition of S-400 systems as part of a deal with Russia that was negotiated in 2016 – United States moves to impose sanctions on India.

There are two ways to view this. The first is the straight-forward defence-industry perspective. The S-400 is a pretty good system. Indeed, I would contend that it appears to be a *better* system than the US-made Patriot ABM/SAM system. Not least because I am yet to encounter any reports of an S-400 employment demolishing city-blocks in urban areas it is supposed to be defending – as reportedly happened both during Israel’s usage of same during the first Gulf War against Iraqi SCUDs, and more recently in Saudi Arabia during Houthi missile attacks.

Just as we saw with the alleged pressure put on NATO members to acquire wildly expensive US-made F-35 hangar-queens instead of more sensible or proven aircraft … the American defence industry appears to increasingly survive not on providing ‘cutting edge’ hardware to clients (partially, to be fair, due to software issues…) – but rather, through having the “strong arm” of US geopolitical pressure endeavour to apply some form of ‘cutting edge’ to the jugular veins of (non-military) trade-flows between potential customers and the American market.

However, while it would be tempting to simply consider this another bout of American “please-don’t-buy-their-gunboats” “diplomacy”, to do so would be to decontextualize this instance from its place in the broader (and increasingly troubled) Indian relationship with the United States.

In the last few months, we have seen repeated “warnings” from America to India that the US will not tolerate ongoing Indian strengthening of diplomatic and other ties with Iran.

Indeed, the most recent round of these effectively issued India with a straight-up ultimatum to almost immediately abandon its importation of five hundred thousand barrels per day of Iranian oil (this represents Iran’s largest petroleum export market)

Now, while it is again possible to view the above as yet another manifestation of American domestic-producer protection (i.e. the Trump Administration is fairly keen to continue to support expansions in US oil production – something largely made possible through the effects American efforts against both Iran and Venezuela, as well as Russia, have had on price and supply in the global energy market) , this misses the geopolitical realities at play here – as well as, come to think of it, the historic precedence for same.

By pursuing positive relations with Iran, maintaining its strong relations with Russia, and also continuing to build upon the last decade or so’s perhaps striking relationship-building with America … all at the same time … India is demonstrating a sound application of the principle of “Multipolarity” in practice.

And as it happens, this is not a new ‘stance’ nor situation for India, either – once upon a time, She was the leading state of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Yet however much sense it might make for India (and, indeed, the world at large) to embrace Multipolarity in geopolitical affairs, the Americans have never been particularly keen on the idea. Not since they started to realize they were a true global (super)power, at any rate.

As we will recall from the Cold War – the American position tended to be that you either ‘picked’ them or the Soviets; with endeavours at ‘doing business’ with both ‘sides’ strongly discouraged. A situation which, I would argue, actually *cost* them a considerable number of potential amicable diplomatic relationships for basically no reason other than pride and pedantry.

And while this would be bad and limiting enough for the ‘client states’ in question, what has invariably made it worse is the American insistence upon ‘paternalism’ in these relationships.

That is to say, point-blank refusing to countenance their dealings with other sovereign states in the course of such arrangements as anything like a ‘conversation’ of even notional equals, or actual ‘partners’ who each bring to the table valid points of view.

Instead, as we are seeing with the recent threats against India – a far more ‘unilateral’ approach is taken, perhaps as befits an ‘Imperial Center’ who’ve come to view themselves as some horrendous combination of “Hyperpower” and “Chakravartin”.

A unipolar hegemon who, it would appear, has all but forgotten what it is to have “friends” on the international stage, in avowed preference of viewing its associates as something altogether more akin to “satrapies”.

And to be fair here – both to the US in general, as well as to the Trump Administration in particular – this is not entirely a new phenomenon. If one were to look not at all that far back in the annals of history, something like the unjust demands made of Japan by America at the Plaza Accords in 1985 stands out as an emblematic example. Or, for that matter, the US’s straight-up diktat-orial refusal to compromise with New Zealand over the issue of their nuclear ships in our waters which was occurring roughly contemporaneously.

Going back further, and further-afield, we can find any number of Imperial powers carrying out similar conduct with regard to smaller or otherwise less ‘potent’ polities, and for avowedly similar reason.

Although the funny thing about that is – this kind of arrogant and aggressive conduct not infrequently occurs toward the *end* of a given Power’s tenure as ‘giant in the playground’.

How long, for instance, did it take Athens to go from purporting to uphold (Greek) Freedom against a tyrannous “evil empire” … through to the much-changed rhetoric of the Melian Dialogue (wherein the Athenians abandoned the high-minded pretenses the Delian League was nominally founded under, and proceeded to offer terms to the previously neutral state of Melos which literally amounted to “Join (and pay exorbitant tribute) Or Die” ) … and from thence to escalating rebellion among its previous ‘allies’ in response to increasingly brutal Athenian conduct, followed not long after by Spartan triumph and Athenian geopolitical and political collapse.

With all of that in mind, the Americans would perhaps be advised to ponder whether this ongoing campaign of attempted-intimidation against a rising Great Power in pursuit of very much *temporary* gains against a regional adversary or for their less-competitive domestic industries … is actually likely to be “worth it” in the longer run.

We have all heard the aphorism “Don’t Poke The Bear”, in deference to Russia.

Perhaps, as applies the American interaction with India, the US would be wise to recall another maxim – “Don’t Tread On” the Cobra.