Thanks for your insightful article. Having read it just now, I think I finally understand the failed ceasefire between Rome and Hannibal after Cannae (cf. Israel’s Hannibal Directive). It’s backwards the way Westerners see it. Rome is presented by Western academics as a brave, indefatigable nation, unwilling to admit defeat, and so they remarkably refused any ransom of prisoners with Hannibal. In fact, Rome’s elites were willing to sacrifice their own people for empire, not for their country. Italy was occupied, and Rome and its colonies throughout the peninsula were essentially armed camps. The militaristic ideology of the Republic reminds me of the Wehrmacht’s campaigns, and Israel’s genocide now: provided the resistance fighters die in greater numbers, the occupying army is fine taking casualties, their families just have to deal with it, in fact they should be grateful that their sons died for patria, for Vaterland, for Holy Land, etc., etc. Thanks again for your article, and I think you’re right, the empire will long for the days when they faced milder enemies, that is if this round goes to them.
My take is that Israel is running on empty like Ukraine, keeping up a bellicose front but has already lost strategically, and it's a matter of how badly it wants to lose now. Ukraine can't pay its soldiers without Western money, and Israel's economy is likewise shattered along with soldier morale (after that brief terrorist-frenzy-high in Lebanon). Using your imagery, I do see the abusive relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, but Iran's communications is more of a yawning smack down from an indolent silverback against an uppity adolescent. I gave you warning one, and now warning two. There will be no third warning.
The US is stretched thin and is facing de-dollarization with 35T in debt. It was not militarily capable of defeating Iran in the noughts when it had more money, a jingoistic electorate, and greater military advantage. Now a confident and solid Russia-China-Iran alliance is on the rise. If the US engages in a direct confrontation with Iran and loses, the loss of US perceived dominance in Iran's oil-rich region will be fatal to its global power projection. There is no win here for the US.
The Palestinians have shown they will continue to resist and the Shi'a only get more fierce as their people are martyred, so attempts at subduing through death will not work. While I have my moments of doubt (it would be so easy to sink to the lows of the colonizers), I think holding on to honour and justice also strengthens resolve. In this existential Palestinian-Israeli death spiral, it is the Israelis who do not have the will to persist. The question is how many Lebanese and Palestinians and Yemenis and Iraqis and Syrians and Iranians the colonialists will murder before they admit defeat.
I think for resistance in the belly of the beast, now is the time to prepare Nuremberg-like dossiers for Biden so that as soon as he ceases to be President he is taken to court. He needs to be publicly pilloried along with his Secretary of State for their war crimes and flagrant violations of US domestic law as a cautionary tale for other cowardly aiders and abettors of the genocide so things wind down sooner rather than later.
Oct 10·edited Oct 10Liked by The Anti Empire Project
I remember another communication, vis Jared Kushner and Amos Hochstein, who was Hunter Biden's overseer in Ukraine on behalf of Obama. These two form a mutual admiration society, Kushner and Hochstein. Their grasping, greedy trips to Israel and Lebanon remind me of the little men Goering and Himmler sent behind the German Army to loot, it's the blood discount they seek.
D = brown shirt and R= back shirt, or is it R = brown shirt and D = back shirt, either way everyone is doing the Sieg Heil salute (substitute appropriate French, German, Spanish, or English political parties and personalities and it's the same, just on a smaller scale). Jared Kushner and Amos Hochstein are like the wedding gift scene in the movie Caligula. They are designed and empowered to show the confidence and audacity of whoever is running them; they are there to infuriate anyone hoping for fairness. They are the absolute epitome of depravity, naked capitalism, and corruption and they still walks the streets. Whoever operates them wants everyone to know they are completely untouchable, just like Israel.
Hi Justin: This is a recommendation of an interview and book review which explores more about How Iraq War was a major benefit to Israel and it's oil pipeline business, the role of the ancestor of Kushner and Hochstein, Marc Rich (A vile human I met once in Hong Kong back in 1980s and promptly went home to shower).
Thank you Justin for this important perspective. We have become so used to the concept of external warfare to drive domestic agendas that we clearly have neglected the analysis in terms of communication - and "teaching" between antagonists.
It seems you are striving to build a new vocabulary to describe this communication and mis-communication between the combatant blocks. Perhaps neither Clausewitz nor his heirs were terribly interested in two-way communication between colonizer and colonized. Colonial administrators like Churchill presumably were also primarily interested in sending messages and publicly played down what they had to receive; perhaps also his counterparts from Fanon to Mao and Che considered themselves mostly in that business, with the sides flipped.
Only from reading your article it occurred to me that I haven't yet seen a working vocabulary to capture what we are seeing in terms of strategy and messaging - or perhaps lack thereof.
(A vocabulary that Chomsky used is furnished by the aptly named Mafia theory of foreign relations; but that only goes so far: scorched Earth campaigns would seem more like a last resort for a "Godfather" who tends to embody the pragmatic rationality of a businessman).
Still, communication is a sword with three edges (at least): messaging to your peers, your rivals, and to yourself
"[W]e have the narrative mastery to tell your story including whatever lies we wish"
"We can turn your victories into shame, because we control how the world sees you"
While this may be the message (presumably purposefully) being sent to the resistance, I do think it is primarily aimed at domestic audiences. Here the "mastery" while impressive to behold, turns into an absolute necessity.
Chomsky made it a point to remind people of the power of "public opinion" after the disillusionment by the failure to stop the Iraq war: "it had the effect of limiting the extent to which the US could use violence – it didn’t do anything like what it did in Vietnam for example. There were no B52 saturation bombings of, you know, settled areas, no chemical warfare – I mean, all the things they did in Vietnam, they couldn’t do there, there was too much opposition"
Apparently they are trying to find ways around the Vietnam syndrome - and the related GWoT syndrome [Greg Stokes whom you recently had on your podcast]. In Syria, the US leveled entire cities from the air, and was allowed to do so by (1) the enemy being IS/Daesh which actively sought the role of demonized Bond villain in their communication with the West. And (2) by shifting the debate to simultaneously criticizing the Russian air-force for doing the same thing to the same enemy in Aleppo.
Clearly over the past year propagandists have tried very hard to picture Hamas as IS, and to blame the other sides for "unprecedented" carnage.
"look what you made me do"
"we will not be deterred regardless of military casualties"
“we are Muslims, no harm will come to you”
Finally, a lot of the communication is that of an abuser trying to justify their actions. "look what you made me do" is well-worn since Golda Meir's fake readiness to "forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons". It is the self-delusion of what's left of the liberal mind and the ultimate inversion of victim and bully. [It also has the added benefit of helping Western liberals keep themselves from looking too closely at atrocities they are supporting from afar.]
The more recent adoption of a self-image of a nation not to "be deterred regardless of military [and even civilian] casualties" can be seen as the culmination of the superiority of the Sabra - which casts Jews prior to the foundation of the state of Israel as too weak to fight back against the pogroms.
This strength is precisely not rational - there was no logical path to "winning" against the overwhelming forces of mobs let alone of the Wehrmacht; Instead it is based on a peculiar form of trust in providence: escalate now (when if not now?) precisely without a viable long-term plan and assume that the board will shift because of unpredictable external events; exploit these when they occur ("War on 'Terror'" following September 11th...); and repeat the process. Do not think too far ahead (that's for weaklings), but follow Ben Gurion and "see where this process will lead us".
This dovetails with the religious narrative of a chosen people with a ordained fate through a covenant with a superior power, exploited by the secular founders of Israel to create a unified society. As Yasha Levine points out, such a narrative could by its very nature not be contained in a secular box for long.
Any outside messaging by the acts of the resistance upholding moral and legal dignity, from treating hostages like guests to the more general confinement to military targets by essentially all parties in the resistance, likewise appear more incidental. They have (rightly?) mostly given up on appealing to Western audiences and do not seem that concerned with appealing to the occupiers either (apart from trying to get those "equations" hammered into their heads by sheer persistence). Rather they are aimed at keeping their communities unified, and keeping up morale as they have a certain moral weight to them... much like acts of resistance in the struggle against the Nazi occupations in WWII had at the time.
[This leads to some absurd contradictions in my own society (Austria) which is built on a shared national imperative to take the side of the descendants of victims of Nazism especially when it is not defensible to do so. But also that messaging by the resistance is presumably purely incidental.]
Still, this is an important perspective I didn't even know I was largely missing... let's build a vocabulary and hope more two-way communicative processes will set in by sheer force of reality, ones which will be further pursued at the negotiating table...
Thanks for your insightful article. Having read it just now, I think I finally understand the failed ceasefire between Rome and Hannibal after Cannae (cf. Israel’s Hannibal Directive). It’s backwards the way Westerners see it. Rome is presented by Western academics as a brave, indefatigable nation, unwilling to admit defeat, and so they remarkably refused any ransom of prisoners with Hannibal. In fact, Rome’s elites were willing to sacrifice their own people for empire, not for their country. Italy was occupied, and Rome and its colonies throughout the peninsula were essentially armed camps. The militaristic ideology of the Republic reminds me of the Wehrmacht’s campaigns, and Israel’s genocide now: provided the resistance fighters die in greater numbers, the occupying army is fine taking casualties, their families just have to deal with it, in fact they should be grateful that their sons died for patria, for Vaterland, for Holy Land, etc., etc. Thanks again for your article, and I think you’re right, the empire will long for the days when they faced milder enemies, that is if this round goes to them.
My take is that Israel is running on empty like Ukraine, keeping up a bellicose front but has already lost strategically, and it's a matter of how badly it wants to lose now. Ukraine can't pay its soldiers without Western money, and Israel's economy is likewise shattered along with soldier morale (after that brief terrorist-frenzy-high in Lebanon). Using your imagery, I do see the abusive relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, but Iran's communications is more of a yawning smack down from an indolent silverback against an uppity adolescent. I gave you warning one, and now warning two. There will be no third warning.
The US is stretched thin and is facing de-dollarization with 35T in debt. It was not militarily capable of defeating Iran in the noughts when it had more money, a jingoistic electorate, and greater military advantage. Now a confident and solid Russia-China-Iran alliance is on the rise. If the US engages in a direct confrontation with Iran and loses, the loss of US perceived dominance in Iran's oil-rich region will be fatal to its global power projection. There is no win here for the US.
The Palestinians have shown they will continue to resist and the Shi'a only get more fierce as their people are martyred, so attempts at subduing through death will not work. While I have my moments of doubt (it would be so easy to sink to the lows of the colonizers), I think holding on to honour and justice also strengthens resolve. In this existential Palestinian-Israeli death spiral, it is the Israelis who do not have the will to persist. The question is how many Lebanese and Palestinians and Yemenis and Iraqis and Syrians and Iranians the colonialists will murder before they admit defeat.
I think for resistance in the belly of the beast, now is the time to prepare Nuremberg-like dossiers for Biden so that as soon as he ceases to be President he is taken to court. He needs to be publicly pilloried along with his Secretary of State for their war crimes and flagrant violations of US domestic law as a cautionary tale for other cowardly aiders and abettors of the genocide so things wind down sooner rather than later.
I remember another communication, vis Jared Kushner and Amos Hochstein, who was Hunter Biden's overseer in Ukraine on behalf of Obama. These two form a mutual admiration society, Kushner and Hochstein. Their grasping, greedy trips to Israel and Lebanon remind me of the little men Goering and Himmler sent behind the German Army to loot, it's the blood discount they seek.
D = brown shirt and R= back shirt, or is it R = brown shirt and D = back shirt, either way everyone is doing the Sieg Heil salute (substitute appropriate French, German, Spanish, or English political parties and personalities and it's the same, just on a smaller scale). Jared Kushner and Amos Hochstein are like the wedding gift scene in the movie Caligula. They are designed and empowered to show the confidence and audacity of whoever is running them; they are there to infuriate anyone hoping for fairness. They are the absolute epitome of depravity, naked capitalism, and corruption and they still walks the streets. Whoever operates them wants everyone to know they are completely untouchable, just like Israel.
Hi Justin: This is a recommendation of an interview and book review which explores more about How Iraq War was a major benefit to Israel and it's oil pipeline business, the role of the ancestor of Kushner and Hochstein, Marc Rich (A vile human I met once in Hong Kong back in 1980s and promptly went home to shower).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_OcPC7MJok
Fantastic article, Justin. Thank you for your valuable insights.
Thank you Justin for this important perspective. We have become so used to the concept of external warfare to drive domestic agendas that we clearly have neglected the analysis in terms of communication - and "teaching" between antagonists.
It seems you are striving to build a new vocabulary to describe this communication and mis-communication between the combatant blocks. Perhaps neither Clausewitz nor his heirs were terribly interested in two-way communication between colonizer and colonized. Colonial administrators like Churchill presumably were also primarily interested in sending messages and publicly played down what they had to receive; perhaps also his counterparts from Fanon to Mao and Che considered themselves mostly in that business, with the sides flipped.
Only from reading your article it occurred to me that I haven't yet seen a working vocabulary to capture what we are seeing in terms of strategy and messaging - or perhaps lack thereof.
(A vocabulary that Chomsky used is furnished by the aptly named Mafia theory of foreign relations; but that only goes so far: scorched Earth campaigns would seem more like a last resort for a "Godfather" who tends to embody the pragmatic rationality of a businessman).
Still, communication is a sword with three edges (at least): messaging to your peers, your rivals, and to yourself
"[W]e have the narrative mastery to tell your story including whatever lies we wish"
"We can turn your victories into shame, because we control how the world sees you"
While this may be the message (presumably purposefully) being sent to the resistance, I do think it is primarily aimed at domestic audiences. Here the "mastery" while impressive to behold, turns into an absolute necessity.
Chomsky made it a point to remind people of the power of "public opinion" after the disillusionment by the failure to stop the Iraq war: "it had the effect of limiting the extent to which the US could use violence – it didn’t do anything like what it did in Vietnam for example. There were no B52 saturation bombings of, you know, settled areas, no chemical warfare – I mean, all the things they did in Vietnam, they couldn’t do there, there was too much opposition"
Apparently they are trying to find ways around the Vietnam syndrome - and the related GWoT syndrome [Greg Stokes whom you recently had on your podcast]. In Syria, the US leveled entire cities from the air, and was allowed to do so by (1) the enemy being IS/Daesh which actively sought the role of demonized Bond villain in their communication with the West. And (2) by shifting the debate to simultaneously criticizing the Russian air-force for doing the same thing to the same enemy in Aleppo.
Clearly over the past year propagandists have tried very hard to picture Hamas as IS, and to blame the other sides for "unprecedented" carnage.
"look what you made me do"
"we will not be deterred regardless of military casualties"
“we are Muslims, no harm will come to you”
Finally, a lot of the communication is that of an abuser trying to justify their actions. "look what you made me do" is well-worn since Golda Meir's fake readiness to "forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons". It is the self-delusion of what's left of the liberal mind and the ultimate inversion of victim and bully. [It also has the added benefit of helping Western liberals keep themselves from looking too closely at atrocities they are supporting from afar.]
The more recent adoption of a self-image of a nation not to "be deterred regardless of military [and even civilian] casualties" can be seen as the culmination of the superiority of the Sabra - which casts Jews prior to the foundation of the state of Israel as too weak to fight back against the pogroms.
This strength is precisely not rational - there was no logical path to "winning" against the overwhelming forces of mobs let alone of the Wehrmacht; Instead it is based on a peculiar form of trust in providence: escalate now (when if not now?) precisely without a viable long-term plan and assume that the board will shift because of unpredictable external events; exploit these when they occur ("War on 'Terror'" following September 11th...); and repeat the process. Do not think too far ahead (that's for weaklings), but follow Ben Gurion and "see where this process will lead us".
This dovetails with the religious narrative of a chosen people with a ordained fate through a covenant with a superior power, exploited by the secular founders of Israel to create a unified society. As Yasha Levine points out, such a narrative could by its very nature not be contained in a secular box for long.
Any outside messaging by the acts of the resistance upholding moral and legal dignity, from treating hostages like guests to the more general confinement to military targets by essentially all parties in the resistance, likewise appear more incidental. They have (rightly?) mostly given up on appealing to Western audiences and do not seem that concerned with appealing to the occupiers either (apart from trying to get those "equations" hammered into their heads by sheer persistence). Rather they are aimed at keeping their communities unified, and keeping up morale as they have a certain moral weight to them... much like acts of resistance in the struggle against the Nazi occupations in WWII had at the time.
[This leads to some absurd contradictions in my own society (Austria) which is built on a shared national imperative to take the side of the descendants of victims of Nazism especially when it is not defensible to do so. But also that messaging by the resistance is presumably purely incidental.]
Still, this is an important perspective I didn't even know I was largely missing... let's build a vocabulary and hope more two-way communicative processes will set in by sheer force of reality, ones which will be further pursued at the negotiating table...
Powerful message!
Great article! Thank you.