The US – that powerful nation standing for peace, self-determination and liberty – as Charles Hugh Smith discusses, is a spectacle, an artifice, a lie. Smith refers to Guy Debord’s 1967 book, and Debord’s subsequent Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.
Debord seems to have completely anticipated my life as a child of the Cold War and adult participant in the rise of the executive warfare state. What’s more, he explained it:
The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.
The constructs in which we operate provide for endless intellectual challenges, often taking us down deep rabbit holes. But rabbit hole or not, all of us are living and producing within a simulated liberty, accompanied by – to paraphrase Debord and Smith – hyper-complex technological systems, unitary and ahistorical governments, and all-encompassing state and techno-narratives created to replace the humane and silence humanity.
We are fascinated by what we see on our screens – in Gaza, in Ukraine and now Venezuela, even in the Pacific. Yet, we must have been getting a snack when the plot twisted and the peace and America First campaign morphed into Tomahawks to Kiev, brutal US-assisted genocide in Gaza, the US Navy blowing up fishermen and other civilians in international waters at will, without consequence.
The media summary of the latest Gaza flotilla was pure Hunger Games-style pablum: “It was the first time since Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza’s waters in 2009 that an unauthorised humanitarian mission has reached closer than 70 nautical miles from the territory.” What is an ‘unauthorized’ humanitarian mission?” Apparently they’re quite common, as we saw with Bush 43 and Katrina, feeding the homeless, and even Peanut the Squirrel.
The current idiotic fiascos – NATO’s Ukraine and Israel’s expansionist murder spree – have been curiously unwinnable, and even more curiously, unstoppable. Trump complained he didn’t understand how difficult it would be to end these wars. The vast majority of countries represented in the United Nations probably agree with Trump on this point – why can’t the stupidity and inhumanity just be stopped (ideally by the US government simply ceasing to fund them)?
Complex systems invariably illustrate path dependency, and authoritarian human herd management requires a complex system. The human cattle chutes created to distribute aid (and bullets) by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – led by Zionists who work for the IDF, as former employee Lt Col Tony Agular explained – are a vivid example of the very limited options these complex state systems are capable of producing.
States are defined and measured by how they use the tools of war against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Israel, a state engaged in an ever expanding civil war, is an excellent example. Land owners displaced and brutalized since 1948 rebel against those who displaced, and then subjugated, them. To prevail, Israel built a western-inspired military and intelligence apparatus, with Zionist wealth, subterfuge and relentless Western enthusiasm for Euro-colonialism’s last gasp in the Middle East. The result was decades of increasingly focused apartheid, punctuated by mass punishment and ever more frenzied ethnic cleansing.
Since 2013, Ukraine has experienced civil war, egged on and facilitated by a US/NATO search for meaning, and expanded military practice ranges. Ukraine and Gaza both serve as testing grounds for newer weapons, technologies and tactics as well as for broad-based narrative control, manipulation of emotion in siphoning GDP away from citizens and into global war industries without valid national security interests or democratically declared war, and development of AI and secret mathematical algorithms to create popular support for state objectives, and silence those who might question them. Debord’s “eternal present” is a goal largely achieved in the West – and strongly resisted in the rising East and South. Perhaps that explains everything.
Washington has been actively participating in these civil wars, with electron and bomb, political lies and narrative maintenance. Americans watch, discuss, are entertained and frightened by them, from afar. We have already paid for our tickets, the actors, directors, studios and advertising. Federal Reserve money creation, government accounting malpractice and the 35% state toll on everything we make or do means we are invested, without our consent or even the common courtesy of a prospectus telling us that past success is no guarantee of future results.
Has the next American civil war started yet? If civil war can be defined by the militarized command, control and exploitation of one part of the state or society by another, it’s been going on in the US for a long time. The McLean House in Appomattox exists as historical marker rather than end-point.
The good news is that path dependency of the state ultimately ensures its demise. Ukraine’s backers “are trapped by their own contradictions: a war they cannot win but dare not end, a financial burden they cannot sustain but fear to drop.” Trump’s Nobel-Peace-prize-clock-is-ticking demand for unconditional surrender of Gaza to Israel, couched as a peace agreement, is the price of path dependency. To have “peace,” Trump and Netayahu have “only” one option – to rain down hell like no one has ever seen on the one and a half million surviving Palestinians on the strip.
In Israel’s case, endless militarism, racism, territorial expansion and failing to fact check their own propaganda has broken their budget, gutted their economy, increased their dependence on geriatric Christian Zionists, and ruined the Zionist promise of a safe place for Jews in the world. The US government, Israel’s ugly golem, faces similar global contempt, in no small part for demonstrating to everyone the incompetence of its expensive weapons systems, the lack of courage of its civilian and military leadership, and the disorganized unraveling of the US military empire, which does not win, place or show in races of state technology, logistics, energy, or diplomacy.
But, Palantir, you say, and all of the commercialized Hasbara here in the US? And what about the unconstitutional uses of the military and the posse comitatus experimentation conducted by DC and the brainiacs who run it? I suspect these are jagged responses to ongoing civil war, rather than preparation for it. Path dependency and history both tell us the state is rarely prepared for foreign wars, and even less so for domestic ones. It is typically late to the party, and always inappropriately dressed.
State minders over-estimate the power of government-curated diversion and circuses, and overlook a copious by-product of the “eternal present” of Debord’s integrated spectacle. This by-product is boundless cynicism, fostering disbelief of the state, renewed interest in human connectedness and inspiration outside the state, and a thousand naturally occurring forms of civil disobedience and smiling anti-authoritarianism. The civil war is ongoing, and Trump sits astride a state that is reacting, as states tend to do, far too late and with one path-dependent hand tied behind its back.
Reprinted with permission from LewRockwell.com.
