Tag: Empire

A Story Our Corrupted Leaders Don’t Want You to Hear

by The Other Schell, posted in US Foreign Policy, World Open

Ordinary Citizens Are the ‘Sleeping Giant’ Who will Eventually Dismantle the Empire

The crowd on the Palestine rally in London’s Trafalgar Square. 11.04.23 https://socialistworker.co.uk/palestine-2023/huge-numbers-stage-protests-and-sit-ins-for-palestine-across-britain/

There was an eye opening event that happened last Tuesday in the heart of the US Empire that quashes any notion that ordinary people, like you and I, have no agency to stop this hellish madness that has arrested control of our country. I would like to share it with you and you let me know what you think.

It was around 9:40am CST, and I was running some errands before I was to meet a client at 10am about pouring a concrete pad for his above ground swimming pool. To briefly sketch some context, I live in an ordinary small town of about 25 thousand people in Mid-Western USA. In a country where lawlessness on behalf of our greed soaked leaders is common place, we go about our daily lives still minding the traffic signals, stopping at crosswalks for pedestrians, waiting behind the stopped school buses as they are loading and unloading children, and we still pull over to let emergency vehicles pass so that they can reach a person(s) in need at the other end of their journey. You know, we basically still follow the laws we were taught to follow since we were kids so that Yeats’ “Mere anarchy is [not] loosed upon the world.”

Believe it or not, in my neck of the woods common courtesy is still a thing. You still see people open a door for another at the convenience mart, even if their hands aren’t full. In this interchange it is not unusual to hear a, “Yes Ma’am” or “Yes Sir” as that’s just the way we were raised. And a “Thank you” is the common follow up from the obligee to the obliger. Many years ago this all happened with little notice. Now, in a conflictual world that has been turned upside down, people notice! This may be the only act of care they experience for the rest of their day.

In this ordinary Midwest muddy river town some of us are politically red, some blue, others somewhere in between. And some of us have long ago given up the shades of the red/blue color spectrum and sit outside the political prison that has dominated our lives over the last three quarters of a century. Even in these little micro-metros, some people have begun to realize that John Wayne is dead, Norman Rockwell painted nostalgic fantasies, the American dream was just a dream after all, and our fearless leaders do not have our best interest at heart.

Don’t get me wrong, we have our fair share of physical/sexual violence, thievery, and corruption in this town. But that was not at the forefront currently.

“The Full Treatment”- Norman Rockwell, 1940 -digital copy

So, I am sitting at one of the busier intersections of our humble burg around 9:40am waiting for the light to turn green, and I watch as a pickup truck with its tail gate down comes barreling into the intersection and makes a hard left hand turn. I, and the others awaiting their turn at the cross jaws drop as the load of new lumber that was stacked high and loose on the back of the truck comes flying out of the bed and onto the pavement at the center of intersection. The truck’s spare tire, which was sitting on top of the load, was launched over the bedside of the truck and came rolling past the front of my vehicle.

As a matter of course, I jump out of my truck and stop the tire in mid-roll and direct it back to the now stopped vehicle blocking traffic at the intersection. As I approach, the driver and passenger of the halted vehicle get out to survey the situation. The eighty something passenger was the grandmother of the fifty something driver; both were absolutely dumb struck. As I leaned the spare tire against their truck, I asked the grandmother how far they had to go and she said to Calhoun, as her eyes remained gazed at the twixty-twisted pile of wood on the pavement. Calhoun is a thirty plus mile ride from where we stood. I heard someone behind me and turned to see that a younger woman had gotten out of her car that was blocked at the intersection, and picked up one of the planks from the pile to put it in the back in the Calhouner’s truck. I was kind of surprised by this as the granddaughter was still standing in a frozen position on the other side of the truck with a bewildered look on her face. The younger women literally had to ask the granddaughter to move so that she could complete her intent?!? There had to have been at least forty people blocked at that intersection that were staring at us wondering what the hell we were going to do.

I turned to grandma shaking my head,

“Ma’am, you weren’t going to get two blocks, let alone to Calhoun, with the way that load was set on your truck. Whoever did that didn’t do you any favors.”

As I spoke with her, I noticed that another person, a middle aged male, had exited his vehicle to help re-load the truck. I started smiling.

I told grandma, as I pointed up the road,

“Once you get re-loaded, take the next right and pull over. I will meet you there. Drive slow, or you’ll drop that load again.”

Then another blocked driver got out of his car and started helping re-load the lumber, then another, and then two more! I was really smiling then. ‘This is so beautiful,’ I thought. ‘People helping each other is why we’re here.’

With all the help, the fifty planks and the tire were back on the truck within about 15 minutes, and grandma and granddaughter were slowly headed up to the next turn just like I suggested. The good and noble Samaritan helpers, half-hurried back to their cars to go about their day, as I heartily thanked them all.

The Good Samaritans of Gaza- Two men carrying a child injured during Israeli bombardment in Rafah, 12.14.23- https://truthout.org/articles/palestinian-women-and-children-dont-deserve-to-die-in-gaza-neither-do-men/

I met the couple at the next turn and directed them to the closest parking lot. The granddaughter gets out of the truck and I told her, “We got some work to do here and I’m late for an appointment so we gotta get movin’.” She looked at me like she was a bit perturbed. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Again, I shook my head,

“We have to unload all the planks out of this truck and re-stack the load with the tailgate closed. That’s the reason you lost the load, and the tie off strap they used to hold the load in place was loose. You got at least three quarters of a ton of weight here. If you want to make it all the way back to Calhoun, we gotta do this.”

She begrudgingly agreed as I started pulling the planks and the tire off the truck. I have to admit that I was somewhat confused by her resistant demeanor but, I was running behind and didn’t have time for a heart to heart discussion. She finally pitched in and we got the truck unloaded and reloaded with the tailgate up and the strap re-fastened and cinched tight with some stainless steel wire that I had in my tool box.

I was soaked with sweat. The button down dress shirt I wore for the meeting had tar smeared on it from their spare tire I was lugging around. I turned to the granddaughter and said, “You’re ready to go,” and she got back in the driver’s seat without a word. I walked to the passenger side of their truck and told grandma that they should make it to Calhoun without a problem. She gave a near emotionless “Thank you,” and they pulled off.

As I was driving to my meeting, I recalled the powerful display of spontaneous assistance that helped the Calhouners get back on the road and began smiling again.

If people spontaneously worked together to solve this issue, what prevents us from banding together to solve the larger issues that face our country today? This very real possibility scares the hell out of the moralless oligarchs who are attempting to take complete control of our lives. The fear they experience when they witness a massive display of solidarity among the ordinary populous throws them into maddening convulsions, because they know that coordinated creative energy can wield tremendous political power. Power that would dismantle their wicked networks of domination and force them to surrender the democracy that they have subverted for their own pernicious means. This “people power” as the renowned Stack author, Sobia Quazi puts it, would hold our leaders to account for the crimes they committed against us and the rest of our human family.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes:

Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s John Wayne movies were regular entertainment in our household. He had long been seated as the iconic US American macho male by this time, promoting individualism, American exceptionalism, and moral superiority. With the vantage of hindsight and a little research, Wayne is exposed as a US White Supremacist who glorifies war and served as a useful propaganda tool for the US military industrial complex. In later interviews he openly praises the colonialist genocide of Native North Americans and blamed the indigenous peoples for their own extermination as they were being selfish in not sharing their land. To make sure that Americans understood his position, in 1971 he stated, “I believe in white supremacy,” in an interview with Playboy Magazine. Sadly, he is still worshiped today as what it means to be an American. For a good review of John Wayne’s legacy, you can read Loren Kantor’s article on Medium.

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The End of Humanity as We Know It

by The Other Schell, posted in Being Human, Evolutionary Intelligence

A Sobering Look at the US/Israel Coalition and What Needs to Be Done

Guy Schell

Apr 03, 2025

Editor’s Note: I published an article on antisemitism yesterday and later discovered that Patrick Lawrence, a master craftsman among renowned journalists, had published an article through Consortium News that addressed the same topic, on the same day. I am reposting the article in its entirety here. Please feel free to share this widely with others.

Both articles come with stark warnings. At the risk of sounding overly apocalyptic, the 10 to 15 minutes you spend reading this could help save lives. However, what is currently happening in Palestine, the USA, and elsewhere is not the will of some demonic god. These evils are being committed by a minority of disturbed human beings, and it will take a combined effort of the majority of human beings to stop it.

PATRICK LAWRENCE: American Freefall

April 2, 2025

The extent to which the U.S. has embarked on a departure from reality is only a question for empires in their waning decades.

Department of Homeland Security agents detaining Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk last week. (WhoIsCentreLeft/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is time to do something — something very few of us have considered until now.

Rashid Khalidi, in a stinging opinion piece in The Guardian, asked, “Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?” Khalidi posed this question after the university where he taught for many years capitulated to the Trump regime’s demands that it compromise academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association while submitting its programs of study to political purview. All this in response to charges that anti–Semitism is rife among students demonstrating against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Khalidi — some poetic justice here — is the emeritus Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. Among his books is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan, 2020). Here is part of what he published in The Guardian:

“It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to….

This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17–month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland….

These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by The New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university….”

When Immigration and Customs goons arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s demonstrations at Columbia, Homeland Security initially said only that he “engaged in activities aligned with Hamas.” The State Department subsequently cited a provision in the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, asserting that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Sheer Charade

Demonstrators outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Washington, D.C., on March 10, after federal agents targeted pro-Palestine student activist Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Last week the Trump regime added new allegations against Mahmoud Khalil, asserting that he withheld information on when he applied for permanent residency status last year. Even the Zionist-supervised New York Times sees through this ruse. “The Trump administration,” it reported, “appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil’s case.”

Amid these legal maneuvers President Donald Trump declared on social media, “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti–Semitic, anti–American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Since then ICE officials — masked ICE officials—have arrested a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, on the same grounds: A DHS spokesperson explained this week that “Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” Tufts officials have been told Ozturk’s visa has been revoked.

I read now that a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama was arrested Tuesday and similarly charged. Alireza Doroudi is an Iranians in the U.S. on a student visa.

Consider these events and what Trump regime officials say about them.

The imperatives imposed by the Zionist lobbies in the U.S. long, long ago destroyed what integrity remained among U.S. mainstream media. Now they are destroying institutions of higher learning, the Justice and Homeland Security departments and altogether American law.

And all of these institutions proceed, or pretend to proceed, as if nothing at all is amiss. The Justice Department pretends it is just, Homeland Security pretends it protects the homeland, the Trump regime pretends it acts lawfully, Columbia’s administrators — and here come numerous other capitulationists like them — pretend they are guardians of free intellectual inquiry and an uncensored discourse on their campuses.

To what extent has America embarked on a departure from reality that may be unprecedented in history but for empires in their waning decades? The fact that this is a serious question, and I consider it so, is suggestion enough that this perverse national journey has begun.

I think of an essay Arthur Miller published in the Dec. 30, 1974, edition of New York Magazine. “The Year It Came Apart” was a long, anguished look back to 1949, when, the noted playwright considered, postwar America began to lose its way. “Nothing any longer could be what it seemed,” Miller wrote. This is among the phrases that comes to mind now: Nothing in our public life can any longer be taken as being what it pretends to be — as authentically itself, this is to say.

Miller at the 1986 PEN Congress. (Bernard Gotfryd/U.S. Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons/ Public domain)

Here is the full passage in Miller’s piece to which I refer. The ellipses are mine:

“An inner fabric began to tear apart…. We would be entering a period of what the Puritan theology call Spectral Evidence….

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.”

I come to Simius Cognitius, who publishes a private blog from his farm in central Massachusetts (fortunate fellow). He wrote the other day:

“For all sane and rational people, what is now being officially and legally defined as ‘anti–Semitism’ in our once proud but now pitiably fallen nation, has now been elevated to a Moral Imperative.

The only way for any individual to maintain her or his sanity in our morally broken nation, which now officially declares that it is illegal to express any criticism, any at ALL, of a group of people who are wantonly murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, including tens of thousands of children and babies, right out in broad daylight, right before our very eyes… the only way to stay sane in such a morally depraved and insane nation, is to criticize that group more vigorously.

Once more, for emphasis … If criticizing Jewish people [CN: Zionist leaders] for their utter moral depravity, for actual mass-murder of even children and babies, is anti–Semitic, then it becomes a Moral Imperative to openly express one’s anti–Semitism.”

I am with Simius Cognitius on this point: While registering the strongest objection, I declared myself an anti–Semite by the offensively irrational definition imposed upon us at the time of the al–Aqsa incident in May 2021. The alternative would be coerced silence.

But if the diabolic machinations of Zionists and their lobbies have precipitated the headlong descent of our polity, America lost all access to a beautifully moral world long before its sponsorship of the Israelis’ campaign of terror in Gaza and lately the West Bank. Arthur Miller was in mourning by the mid–1970s, let us not forget.

Closer to our time, Chris Hedges published a book to this same effect not so many years ago. In Empire of Illusion (Nation Books, 2009), he looks not back but out his window — finding in the world as we have made it a morally collapsed culture wherein reality is incessantly confused with spectacle, self-deception, and illusion.

I offer readers this, my basket of apples and oranges. I do not know how else to capture in a few words the astonishing state of free-fall in which we find ourselves.

Over the past week or so three of the programs we watch on a regular basis featured guests that, to my great surprise, drew the same conclusions as to what means of response are available to paying-attention people in our blighted circumstance.

John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago foreign affairs professor, and Chas Freeman, the estimable ambassador emeritus, spoke on back-to-back segments of Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom program. Chris Hedges interviewed Katherine Franke, recently forced out of her tenured position as a professor at Columbia University Law School for her advocacy in behalf of those who have demonstrated for the Palestinian cause.

August figures all. And how curious that all three got asked the same question. We have an administration that is openly unresponsive to its citizens, indifferent to their constitutional rights, and abusive of the law; the judicial system appears on the way to failing: What do you think people should do?

I thought the question alone was an interesting reflection of our shared predicament. And I liked Ambassador Freeman’s reply best for his calm matter-of-fact delivery. He effectively paraphrased the others, in any event.

“Well,” Freeman said, “there’s the street.”

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

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