Category: imperialism

Synchronicity and September 11th

I: Introduction–What is Synchronicity?

Synchronicity is a concept that CG Jung wrote about in 1960. Literally, “unified time,” synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences that have no causal connection. Because of this acausality, there’s no scientific way of testing the idea by way of falsifiability; one either believes in synchronicity, through personal, subjective experience, or one doesn’t believe in it.

Jung’s belief in this idea was part of his interest in spirituality, myth, and religion in themselves, not just for their psychological meaning, as atheistic Freud would have used them. This difference of opinion is essentially why Freud and Jung had a falling-out.

There are dozens of YouTube videos out there on synchronicity, describing it all too often in a sentimentalized way, linking it with ideas like the “law of attraction.” To be honest, I’d rather stay away from this kind of rose-tinted glasses interpretation.

To be even more frank, I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether or not I believe in synchronicity. As of this writing, I’ve recognized one distinct synchronicity that’s occurred over the past fifty-one years: three incidents occurring on September 11th–one in 1973, one in 1990, and one in, of course, 2001.

Notice how none of these three dates, assuming you know the history of all three incidents, are in any way ‘positive’ or sentimentalized. These three are the Chilean coup d’état of 1973, George HW Bush’s 1990 speech about us moving into a new world order (I’ll go into what is so unsettling about the speech below), and of course the terror attacks of 2001.

What these three incidents have in common beyond all sharing the same date–and this is the deeply meaningful part–is how all three tie in with US imperialism.

II: The Three September 11th Years

The Chilean coup d’état, backed by the CIA, ousted the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, a socialist who wanted to nationalize Chilean industries and thus thin the wallets of the American capitalists who wanted to be able to continue exploiting the country. Allende was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator and puppet of the Western imperialists. Allende’s socialist economic policies would be replaced by the “free market” ones of the Chicago Boys. Any leftist resistance resulted in imprisonment, violent punishments, killings, and being ‘disappeared,’ which included being thrown out of helicopters.

While Bush’s 1990 speech tried to present the coming new world order as a positive change in the political climate of the time, properly understood, the president was heralding a post-Soviet world, in which the “free market” had triumphed over ‘Big Brother’ government and socialism. The USSR hadn’t yet been dissolved as of the speech, but its demise was coming soon, and no one knew better that this dissolution was coming than the very people who’d been scheming about it. The fall of communism allowed the capitalists to do anything they wanted…to everyone.

As for the terror attacks in 2001, it really doesn’t matter if we go with the official narrative that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda masterminded the attacks, and that George W Bush’s administration was too careless and incompetent to have prevented the attacks; or if you believe it was an inside job with controlled demolitions, and that it was all blamed on Al Qaeda and, by extension, the whole Muslim world. What matters is how the attacks were used by the American ruling class to manufacture consent for war after war in the Middle East, not only to steal the oil and enrich themselves with it, but also to exercise their dominance over the whole region, being the capitalist imperialists that they are.

Indeed, as far as all three of these incidents are concerned, it isn’t so much what happened on September 11th as it is the aftermath. What happened on that day, these three times, was more about the warning of what was to come than the inciting event itself. For another part of this synchronicity is, how 911 can signify an emergency telephone number you ring when an urgent situation comes up.

III: The Chilean Coup D’état

All three of these incidents could be, and should have been, seen as dire warnings that matters were about to get much worse. The replacement of a socialist government with a right-wing dictatorship using “free market” economic policies was a kind of ‘laboratory experiment,’ if you will, to see how well it would go…from the point of view of the global capitalist class, of course. They never cared that the Chicago Boys’ economic policies were a disaster for poor Chileans; what mattered was the huge amassing of wealth for the rich, known as the “miracle of Chile.” As of the 1980s, this “free market” experiment would be tried in the US under Reagan and in the UK under Thatcher.

So the immiseration of the poor Chileans would be extended to Americans and the British. The lie would be propagated that the “free market” would involve minimal state intervention in the economy, when a) there’s always at least some state intervention in it, and b) state protection of private property, especially when the capitalist class accumulates a huge amount of private property, necessitates a particularly intrusive form of government…capitalist government–hence, Pinochet’s brand of fascism, hand in hand with the “free market.”

And still, right-wing libertarians and ‘anarcho’-capitalists continue to be duped by the idea that “true” capitalism is antithetical to an intrusive state. One shouldn’t be surprised in the least that Reagan‘s ‘small government’ (translation: war on the poor) would be accompanied by a great increase in military spending as part of a scheme to bring the USSR to an end. Since imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, requiring the expansion of markets and capital into other countries, an expanded military will be needed to protect the interests of capitalist globalization.

Now, where plunging people into poverty hits you immediately, and scathingly, when you live in Third World Latin America, as was the case with Chileans in the 1970s, hitting us in the First World with poverty is more insidious and gradual in its effects. Problems like homelessness certainly increased under Reagan in the 1980s, but it’s grown worse since then, and now in the 2020s, there’s an epidemic of homelessness in many cities in the US and elsewhere.

This is all why I see a synchronistic meaning in these three September 11th dates and the emergency number 911. The Chilean coup d’état was an urgent warning not to let the “free market” counter-revolution spread to other countries. It was a warning left unheeded.

IV: Bush’s ‘New World Order’ Speech

As I said above, Bush’s new world order speech was presented in rosy, optimistic language about a new era of triumphant liberal democracy, since it was understood that the Cold War was over. There would be a greater commitment to US strength as the leader of that promotion of liberal democracy. Translation: US imperialism would reign supreme, and every other government in the world was expected to do whatever the US government told them to do.

There would be a Soviet-American partnership in promoting world democracy, as Bush expected. Again, translation: Russia was expected to do American bidding as everyone else was. Gorbachev‘s compliance with all of this was further proof of his weak, treasonous leadership.

Of course, nothing like Bush’s rosy vision came to be since September 11th, 1990. The advancement of American imperialist ambitions certainly did, though. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989, it was already known that communism was out, and that Russia’s days, in their Soviet form, were numbered.

But while the mainstream Western media of the time were hailing the end of the Cold War as a triumph for democracy and the “end of history,” it would be foolish to assume that most Russians, and indeed many in the former Soviet Bloc, were holding their arms up, ready to embrace ‘capitalist freedom.’ Most people in the USSR wanted to keep the Soviet system; Boris Yeltsin and his ilk forcibly took it away.

In fact, since then, poll after poll has been done in Russia, indicating that majorities of Russians have consistently said life in Soviet-era Russia was happier than it has been since the era’s end. Since they were provided with free healthcare, education, housing, full employment, and other government benefits, it isn’t hard to see why the Soviet system was preferred.

While the Soviet system surely had its faults, it was also an effective counterweight to Western imperialism. The USSR aided anti-imperialist liberation movements in the Third World, and its example pushed the postwar capitalist West to adopt welfare systems and public healthcare. With the USSR’s demise, though, the West has had less and less incentive to keep these social services going. Accordingly, we’ve been losing them, bit by bit, over the years.

The signing of NAFTA not only took jobs away from American workers, but also gave those jobs, at lower pay, to Mexicans. The corporate tax rate, cut way down by the Reagan administration, stayed low (and was cut even lower by the Trump administration…it’s unlikely that Biden or anyone will raise it significantly any time soon).

Clinton killed welfare in the mid-1990s. His signing of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 led to the mergers and acquisitions in the media that, in turn, has led to 90% of American media being owned by only six corporations, meaning that the vast majority of our access to information is controlled by the rich. (This American near-oligopoly on information, incidentally, is also internationalized.) The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act led, as many believe, to the 2008 financial crisis. And the government bailed the big banks out.

All of these forms of government intervention were clearly in the interest of capital…and yet there are still political idiots out there who think that the government and capitalism are musically exclusive opposites. Long live the “free market”!

The above are but a few examples of what Bush’s new world order resulted in for the US. Now we must take a brief look at what the ideas of his September 11th speech led to for Russia.

Part of the reason we should regard with skepticism Bush’s claim to greater Soviet-American cooperation (at the time, in the context of a united response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and therefore Gorbachev’s compliance with Western imperialist interests) is that, when the Berlin Wall fell, and East and West Germany were to be reunited and thus a part of NATO, it was promised to Gorbachev, most mendaciously, that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

Note how much farther eastward NATO has advanced to the East since then. A number of former SSRs and Warsaw pact members–the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania–joined NATO. Russia has NATO armies right on her borders now! Attempts have been made to have Ukraine join, too.

Anybody who knows anything about NATO realizes that the organization is an extension of US imperialism. These members of NATO do the bidding of the American empire, even when it’s against their own national interests to do so.

The debacle that has been the Russia-Ukraine war is squarely the fault of the US/NATO empire…but you wouldn’t know that to read the lies and propaganda of the Western media, who routinely call it “Russia’s war” and “Putin’s war.” Indeed, so much effort has been made to call Russia’s intervention “unprovoked” that in fact such a lie has been told precisely to cover up the fact that it was most definitely provoked.

Collaboration of the capitalist West with ex-Nazis, from the end of WWII to the present, has included the recruitment of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers the whole time. Knowledge of this exposes the lie in the current capitalist mainstream media that there is no major Nazi menace in Ukraine.

Ever since a CIA-assisted coup d’état in 2014 in Ukraine, removing democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych and replacing him with US puppets (recall Chile in 1973 and see these coups as part of a pattern), Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers have been part of their government and military, including far-right organizations like the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, and other admirers of Stepan Bandera.

These Russophobic extremists were, for the eight years between the coup and the beginning of the Russian intervention, discriminating against the use of the Russian language and terrorizing ethnic Russians in the Donbass. Putin, branded an “imperialist” and a “fascist” in a shameless act of projection by the Western establishment media, tried everything he could to find a peaceful resolution over those eight years, including the Minsk accords.

All the US and NATO have wanted to do is to keep sending weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, including weapons that can be fired into Russia, which could provoke a wider war–WWIII, which in turn could go nuclear and bring about the end of the world. Since all of these events stem ultimately from the hypocritical words and secret schemes of Bush et al when he spoke on September 11th, 1990, we can see the 911 emergency that also went largely unheeded.

V: The Terrorist Attacks

That the terrorist attacks of 2001 were ringing the 911 emergency number is so obvious that I hardly need to explain how, but going through its consequences can remind us of the gravity of this emergency. Right from George W Bush’s statement that the attacks were “acts of war,” the red flags were waving.

Not only did the attacks give his administration a pretext for perpetual war (a “war on terror” isn’t directed at any country in particular, so there’s no clear way of ending the war), but they were also used to justify a number of restrictions on American civil liberties (the Patriot Act, which was extended during the Obama administration; racial profiling; NSA surveillance).

This authoritarian stripping-away of civil liberties is all too often assumed by propagandized right-wing idiots to be a form of socialism, since these politically illiterate morons assume that socialism is just “anything a government does.” These people are so ignorant of the political history of their own country that they’ve paid no attention to the removal of workers’ rights over the years (some of which I describe above), the cutting of taxes for the rich, and union-busting, none of which would happen under a socialist government.

These right-libertarians refuse to acknowledge the existence of authoritarian right-wing governments (recall again Pinochet). The Democratic Party–and the Labour Party in the UK–moved to the right because, as I said above, the demise of world communism meant that the West was no longer pressured into accommodating the working class.

US/NATO imperialism thus has been able to do anything it wants to any country, and to anyone within its own countries, with complete impunity. Endless war is in the interest of capital because war is a business–all those weapons manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc., have been laughing all the way to the bank profiting off of human death and suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Ukraine, the Palestinian Territories, and potentially Russia, China, and Iran. The American military is all over Africa, the rationale being that they’re fighting terrorists.

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) means that these weapons manufacturers, in order to remain competitive and survive as businesses, must keep their profits up. The only way they can do that is by either having actual wars all the time or at least sustaining a constant threat of war. No war, no sale of weapons–it’s as simple as that. The “war on terror” has given these companies a most convenient excuse to keep banging the war drums.

The scapegoating of the many heads of state around the world who refuse to kow-tow to US imperialism–starting with Milošević and Saddam, then continuing with Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and whoever comes up in the future–has led to a desensitizing to the idea of war and its horrors. There was a time when people in the West were instinctively anti-war, regardless of whether they were leftists or mere liberals/hippies; not so much now…though a ray of hope has been seen in some who oppose US support of war in Ukraine and American support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The point is that we’re seeing not just a resurgence of cold-blooded capitalism, but also a resurgence of its extreme…fascism. We’ve seen it in the anti-immigrant policies of Obama the deporter-in-chief, continued by the “anti-establishment” Trump/à la ICE and the caging of Latin Americans, and again continued with no-less-right-wing Biden. We’ve seen fascism in the excessive surveillance online. We see it in militarized cops. We’ve seen fascism in the support of Ukraine, as I discussed above. Indeed, all of the totalitarian things we were told would happen to us under communism have actually happened to us under neoliberal capitalism.

People complain about the supposed lack of human rights in Cuba. To those people, I’ll say two words: Guantanamo Bay. This is a form of contemporary fascism and authoritarian government.

People on the right complained about intrusive government during the Covid pandemic. I’m a skeptic about its dangers, too, but I never saw a “communist plot” to establish a “one-world government.” I saw a group of pharmaceutical companies make huge profits while millions of poor people got poorer–many became homeless. I saw the fascist, authoritarian government that grew out of this problem as a threat of capitalism, not communism.

VI: The Collective Shadow

I hope, Dear Reader, that you can now see the deep meaning behind this triple 9/11 synchronicity. It’s not just three identical dates when something…political…happened. They all share common themes: the intrusion of imperialism, a shift to the political right, violent consequences, the taking away of basic civil rights, and the promotion of fascist, authoritarian government.

Now, part of synchronicity is how the inner psychic life is connected with these meaningful coincidences in the external world. For me, it’s how I saw the deeper meaning in these three September 11th dates and their aftermaths. As for those behind the three events, I’d say that the connection between the inner and outer worlds is based on the Collective Shadow.

Just as there’s a collective unconscious, a large reservoir of all of the unconscious feelings of all of humanity, going back to the earliest of us in prehistory, so is there also an accumulation of all of our worst, most hateful, most bigoted, and most destructive thoughts. This accumulation is the Collective Shadow, an amalgam of the personal Shadow of each and every one of us.

Erich Fromm, in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, would have called this dark part of all of us “the necrophilous character.” He wasn’t referring to the paraphilia; he described “necrophilia” as “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (Fromm, his emphasis, page 369)

Consider in this connection all that resulted from all three September 11th events: the death resulting from Pinochet’s repressions, the terrorist attacks and the imperialist wars that ensued, but also the violence done to Russia as a result of the dissolution of the USSR: Yeltsin bringing out the tanks on the Russian protestors in 1993; his re-election, as a result of American interference in the vote in 1996; the impoverishment of the Russian masses (as a result of privatization) as the elites snapped up most of the amassed Soviet wealth to make themselves the Russian oligarchs; and as I mentioned above, the Western enabling of Ukrainian Nazis to attack ethnic Russians in the Donbass.

Now, please be careful with my use of the the expression “new world order”: I’m not using it in the sense of many right-wing conspiracy theorists who fantasize about a “one-world government” run by Freemasons, “the Jews,” and other members of an imagined elite of people in some kind of secret society of Devil-worshippers (“the Illuminati”). Those who run the world are capitalists and imperialists; they aren’t of any particular ethnic or religious group. They don’t need to have formal meetings, they don’t twirl their mustaches or laugh “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”, as in some badly-written B-movie. They simply share similar interests, and have social get-togethers where they discuss how to further their interests as the ruling class–how to get more for themselves and less for the rest of us.

I don’t believe in the Devil because I don’t need to. Human greed, aggression, and selfishness–spawned by, and a distortion of, the evolutionary drive to survive–sufficiently explain the problem. The Devil as a metaphorical concept, though, the Collective Shadow, might be believed in.

VII: Conclusion (Including 119 and November 9th)

I don’t necessarily believe in any of these ‘supernatural’ ideas; I just want to explore some possibilities, and show how, regardless of whatever the real explanation is for these coincidences, there have been some most disturbing patterns.

I see patterns. I can’t help it.

Incidentally, just as there is the 911 emergency phone number and the three September 11ths, so is there a 119 emergency phone number in parts of Asia (including where I live) and in Jamaica. Furthermore, just for fun, we can, in this connection, look at three dates for November 9th: 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was published in The Times newspaper; 1938, when Kristallnacht happened; and 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Anyone who cares about the Palestinians will see the publication of the Balfour Declaration as, in a way, a kind of declaration of emergency of the oppression to come. Anyone who cares about Jews and worries about the spread of fascism will see the obvious state of emergency in Kristallnacht. And anyone who knows that the real purpose of the Berlin Wall (the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as it was called in East Germany) was to keep bad people out, not to keep good people trapped in (the real resistance against defectors was to prevent brain drain; most of the East German workers and others in the former Soviet states were happy to stay and enjoy the government benefits that were soon to be gone by the 1990s), will see its fall as the beginning of NATO enlargement to the East, which has ultimately culminated in the Ukraine Nazi problem.

Now, you can criticize me, Dear Reader, for being selective about bad events on September 11th and on November 9th, while ignoring many good things that surely also happened on those dates, in different years. The point about synchronicity, though, is not to say that those two dates are “evil” ones; they simply represent, on these six occasions, coincidences that I find highly meaningful. I might consider these synchronicities a manifestation of two of what I call The Three Unities–that is, The Unity of Action and The Unity of Time.

Forget about the coincidental dates, though. The point is that fascism (Nazi or Zionist), and authoritarian, imperialist capitalism, along with its government and endless wars, are on the rise. None of the events of the earlier of those six dates directly caused those that succeeded them; but all of the events I discussed of those dates are disturbingly meaningful.

Raised Fist

O, keep your fingers
on the pulse of what
the people need in this
alienating, unfair world!
A good rule of thumb is
remembering we can’t
do all of this alone.
We all must raise
our arms together
in loving solidarity.
Alone, we’re weak;
together, we’re not.
When our muscles
are stacked, one on
top of the other, we
can be unstoppable,
a giant which could
pound the crap out
of the ruling class. There are so many more of us than there are of them.
They want us just to be fingers and thumbs, all insignificant sinews. We
must link up–as ligaments–muscles and bones. A fist that’s connected
can punch out the rich, so let’s raise it together. Our rulers would have
us all fighting, so we won’t be fighting them, defeating them for good.

Analysis of ‘The Crying Game’

The Crying Game is a 1992 film written and directed by Neil Jordan. It stars Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, Jaye Davidson, and Forest Whitaker, with Adrian Dunbar, Ralph Brown, and Jim Broadbent.

While the theme of the marginalization of race, sex, and sexuality is placed at the forefront of this film, another issue, the right for the self-determination of nations, is also there, but it’s…well, marginalized, as I’ll discuss in more detail in the paragraphs below.

The Crying Game was a critical and commercial success, having won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It also got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Rea), Best Supporting Actor (Davidson), and Best Film Editing. The British Film Institute named The Crying Game the 26th-greatest British film of all time in 1999.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the complete film (minus the credits).

The proper political and historical context of The Crying Game is to be seen in the Northern Ireland conflict, also known as “The Troubles,” which went on for about thirty years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Mainstream Western culture generally looks on the IRA as a bunch of fanatical, cold-blooded terrorists who indiscriminately killed out of a frenzied, passionate nationalism. What is ignored in this kind of judgement against them is the centuries of brutal British imperialist rule that provoked Irish resistance all the way up to the Troubles that began in the late 1960s.

The Crying Game, as well as The Cranberries’ song “Zombie,” are bourgeois liberal portrayals of the IRA as mindless, violent killers rather than embodying legitimate armed resistance against a colonial oppressor, which is recognized in international law and the UN. Ireland was England’s first colony. The Emerald Isle has been invaded again and again from as early as the 12th century, with the Anglo-Norman invasion. Indiscriminate massacres of the Irish, including women and children, went on countlessly. Just as the Palestinians have a legitimate right to armed struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism, so have the Irish had that right against British imperialism.

To go into more detail about this issue would be beyond the scope of this analysis; the links provided above and below should help with the details left out here. Still, I needed to bring this issue up and give it proper attention because The Crying Game fails to do so; just as blacks and transgender people are marginalized in the real world, so is Irish liberation tossed to the side and ignored, in the real world and in this film.

Granted, it is perfectly legitimate to sympathize with blacks and transgender people when they suffer prejudice and bigotry. The problem with The Crying Game is how the film uses these otherwise justified sympathies as forms of identity politics to keep us on the side of imperialist, colonial British rule. The fact remains that, in order to ensure and maintain the liberation of such marginalized groups as blacks and transgender people, the first thing that must be done is to overthrow the capitalist, imperialist system that uses marginalization as a weapon to keep the working class divided; and the IRA, with their leftist ideology, are one of many groups dedicated to that very overthrow.

One of the things the IRA does in The Crying Game, though, is something that very much divides the common people, in this case, the sexes–they have pretty Jude (Richardson) lure a British soldier named Jody (Whitaker) with a promise of sex, in order to kidnap him and threaten to execute him if an imprisoned IRA member is not released by the UK in three days. Jody curses at Jude for being such a Delilah to him. Well, what can I say? The capitalist/imperialist system must end first, then we can work on ending the social divisions.

As I said above, the real aims and purposes of the IRA are not properly explored in this film. As far as The Crying Game is concerned, these people are just a bunch of “extremist,” terrorist bad guys. Jody will be shot in three days, just because the UK authorities won’t free a fellow IRA man. Towards the end of the film, they want to assassinate a British judge: they don’t care who he really is–he’s just “a legitimate target.” As you can see, the IRA are portrayed as killers for the sake of killing, not as freedom fighters.

Note that the film came out in 1992, just after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, and thus neoliberalism could really get going without a leash on its neck. All sympathy for the poor and marginalized would be given within a liberal, non-socialist framework.

As Jody is held by the IRA for the last three days of his life, he cleverly establishes a bond with Fergus (Rea), a Provisional IRA member with long hair (I’ll get into the significance of that later). Jody talks about his girlfriend and his love of playing cricket. This bonding will make it harder for Fergus to shoot Jody when the inevitable third day comes, for the UK government will deem Jody expendable, anyway. From the point of view of the film, and the anti-IRA/pro-British imperialist message it’s trying to convey to audiences, this bonding will humanize Jody for us, making us want to sympathize with him, and therefore with the British side.

One of the ways he gains our sympathies is by complaining about the frank, blunt racism of the Irish that he, as a black man, has to put up with while stationed among them as a British soldier. This otherwise legitimate problem is used to distract us from another legitimate one: UK rule over Northern Ireland. Stereotyping the Irish as crass racists also camouflages their victimhood.

One could relate this racism, the using of a woman to lure a man into a trap, and even Irish collaboration with the UK, to Jody’s story about the Scorpion and the Frog, and how doing what’s against one’s interests is nonetheless in one’s nature.

Jody, as a member of the proletariat no less than Jude, Fergus, or Peter (Dunbar), should be concerned with the interests of the global working class (including other blacks, of course) over those of empire; instead, he chooses the job of British soldier for easy remuneration, and gets stationed in a place where not only will he be openly taunted as a “nigger,” but also where he’s at risk of being kidnapped and killed by the very kind of people who would otherwise be contributing to the fight for the kind of world in which that slur won’t be used anymore. Jody chooses easy money over liberation and safety, though, because it’s in his nature to choose what’s easy over what’s hard.

Jude, in going along with the plan to use her body to lure Jody in, rather than use some other, non-objectifying method, is going against her own interests as a woman, thus having to endure hearing Jody’s slurs of “bitch” and “whore.” Recall how, above, I compared her to Delilah (I’ll go into more Samson symbolism later); her name suggests another Biblical betrayer. Still, being a woman who can’t help having internalized the sexist attitudes of her society (including having to serve Jody, the man who now hates her, food and drink), she can’t help it: it’s in her nature.

The Northern Ireland Unionists, generally Protestant and therefore worried that a unified Ireland–being mostly Catholic–would marginalize them, side with the UK and its terroristic atrocities on the Irish in the hopes of preserving their version of Christianity (or so they rationalize). Instead, by siding with the IRA and its leftist agenda, they could help deal a blow to imperialism–which thrives on such forms of divisiveness as racism, sexism, and religious intolerance–which could lead eventually to a kind of world that would do away with such divisions and liberate us all. Still, it’s in one’s nature to choose the quick and easy solution over the long and hard road of ending capitalism.

Fergus, too, chooses the quick and easy solution of sympathizing with Jody, and later, Dil (Davidson), over sympathizing with his fellow Irish. This latter sympathizing would, as I explained above, ultimately lead to the liberation of everyone, including transgender people, if it were to succeed on a global level. Such a path, though, is long and hard, and Fergus can’t help it–it’s in his nature–to reject such a path, leave the IRA, and even go to jail for Dil’s murder of Jude.

To get back to Jody’s clever manipulating of Fergus to win his sympathy, Jody goes beyond just telling him the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, but he also tells Fergus about his girlfriend, Dil, back in London. He has Fergus take out his wallet so Fergus can see a photo of her, to see how pretty she is. By doing this, Jody humanizes both himself and Dil for Fergus. To humanize himself even more, Jody actually has Fergus take his penis out of his pants so he–his hands tied behind his back–can take a piss!

All of these tactics, of course, make it well-nigh impossible for Fergus to shoot Jody in the woods when the dreaded day comes, for the UK authorities–the ‘good guys,’ recall!–have no intention of saving Jody, only of finding the IRA hideout and killing all of the resistance.

Ironically, it’s the British forces who end up killing Jody by hitting him with an armoured vehicle on the road that he accidentally runs out on. They don’t mean to kill him there, but that doesn’t matter: they’ve never taken seriously the need to save one of their own. As I said above, they consider Jody to be expendable: such an attitude is proven by how the UK flies planes over the IRA hideout and reduces the entire shelter to flames, without a thought that Jody could be in there somewhere.

This moment of British viciousness gives us a taste of the might of Western imperialism, hinting as to why the IRA is resisting them in the first place…if we’d pay close attention. Still, the liberal slant of The Crying Game would have us see this viciousness as an example of how ‘there is bad on both sides.’ Little consideration is given to the fact that one side is much more powerful than the other, and that that powerful side has historically caused much more killing than the other. This same false moral equivalency is used in the worsening situation in Gaza, which is characterized in the mainstream media as a ‘war’ between the IDF and Hamas, rather than as an ongoing genocide of unarmed Palestinian civilians.

Fergus, keeping his promise to Jody to go to London and find Dil, has left the IRA–assuming that Jude and Peter are dead–and renounced their revolutionary ways. He changes his name to Jimmy, and he has his hair cut short, symbolic of Samson losing his strength when Delilah has a servant cut his own hair short. Fergus’s haircut thus can be seen to symbolize his giving up of his strength, a symbolic castration, his renouncing of solidarity to Ireland. His changing of his name only reinforces his turning his back on what he once believed in, as well as lying to Dil that he’s Scottish when she gives him a trim in her hair salon. Really: if he was so half-hearted about the IRA, then why did he join in the first place?

Along with losing his strength, “Jimmy” seems to have lost much of his intelligence, too, for he follows Dil to a gay bar, being attracted to her as a cis-woman, and never cluing into what anatomy she might have under her clothes. Though he falls in love with her, he gets a big surprise when her clothes come off as the two of them are about to be intimate, and his reaction is…as we on the left would say…reactionary.

Some might consider these elements to be coincidental, but leaving the IRA (an example of something that Mao would have called backsliding into liberalism), then being a creep and following a girl at night from her place of work to the local bar, and hitting her when he realizes she’s a transwoman…some of us see a meaningful connection here. This sort of thing is why some of us don’t think that liberals have the best solutions to dealing with marginalized people. When he tells Jody not to take being called a “nigger” seriously, that was bad enough. Look at how far he’s fallen since then.

“Jimmy” gets a job in London as a day labourer, and while he’s had dreams of Jody playing cricket, and he tries to identify with Jody by imagining himself playing the game while on the job as he sees other men playing it, he has to put up with a nagging boss, Mr. Deveroux (played by Tony Slattery), who hardly sympathizes with his apparent athletic aspirations. You chose to sell out to the capitalist world, “Jimmy”; you made your bed–you lie in it.

It’s remarkable after his having come to this gay bar, The Metro, and presumably having seen men with men, and women with women, and he needs the bartender, Col (Broadbent) to tell him that Dil is a transwoman (though Col never gets around to telling him). Dil is onstage, singing “The Crying Game,” a song fittingly covered by Boy George on the movie soundtrack.

“Jimmy” has to help Dil get rid of an abusive boyfriend named Dave (Brown, who you may recall played Danny in Withnail and I, and who also appeared in Alien 3 and Star Wars: Episode I). One night in Dil’s apartment with “Jimmy,” they hear Dave outside on the street calling up to her as if he were Stanley Kowalski calling “Hey, Stella!” Dave isn’t so lucky though: instead of her coming back to him, Dil throws his clothes and his goldfish out the window.

“Jimmy” is touched by how she keeps Jody’s old things: his clothes and old photos of him. As we can see, Jody is still being humanized even after his death. Even though “Jimmy” is initially repulsed to learn that Dil is a transwoman, he still has feelings for her, and so in his conflict over her, she is still being humanized for us. No humanizing of the IRA is anywhere to be seen, though.

She appears at his place of work, walking on the field where the cricket games are played, and therefore reinforcing in his mind the association of her and Jody when he sees her coming. The other workers are whistling at her: I doubt they’d be doing that if they knew what’s under her clothes. He breaks a window frame in his shock at her arrival, angering Mr. Deveroux. It’s interesting how LGBT issues can intersect with other leftist issues like labour (“Jimmy” will be docked pay for the damage), yet not with anti-imperialism.

There’s such mutual alienation between “Jimmy” and Deveroux that the latter calls the former “Pat.” (I suppose that the Irishman can be comforted that at least his boss isn’t calling him “Mick.”) Fergus is thus doubly alienated from himself with these two false names. Deveroux’s sexist attitude to Dil the “tart” is enough to make “Jimmy” want to stand up for her–fair enough–but centuries of British oppression of Ireland aren’t enough for Fergus to stand up for his people. Bonding with Jody is all it takes to make him end his commitment to Irish liberation.

So, “Jimmy” manages to reconcile himself with a transwoman, but he can never reconcile himself with the IRA…and this is when Jude suddenly comes back into his life–Delilah with a new hairstyle of her own. Her new, “tougher look” makes us dislike the IRA all the more–how fitting, for the purposes of this movie.

Her hair isn’t much shorter, though, so she still has her strength–aptly shown when she takes out her phallic pistol. Her hair has gone from blonde to a dark red; her clothes are also darker, all of which reinforces our sense that she’s one of the ‘bad guys.’ Her implicit threat on Dil’s life, if Fergus doesn’t comply with the IRA’s plan to assassinate the judge, also reinforces our sense of antagonism to her.

From here on, we’re meant to see the IRA as not just a bunch of nationalists who are a little too militant for their own good, not just one of ‘two bad sides,’ but as just pure, unmitigated evil. The evil side of the Western empire isn’t even to be considered as such: they’re just ‘mainstream society’ now; in the neoliberal new world order that just defeated the Soviet Union, this globalizing capitalist ‘rules-based order’ is just the way things are. If you try to rebel against it, you won’t just be killed, you’ll be forgotten by most people; history will vilify and blacken your name, and you’ll be marginalized in ways that not even blacks and LGBT people are these days.

The man Fergus is supposed to hit is an aging, arthritic judge. He’s to be shot on the street as he’s struggling to get out of his car and go with his security men into a building. His weakness is again to elicit our sympathy for him, as Jody was sympathized with. We’re not meant to feel any sympathy for, say, the unarmed Irish protestors who were gunned down on Bloody Sunday, for that sort of thing is never mentioned in the film.

Because he wants Dil to be unrecognizable to Jude (who’s seen him with her), Peter, and any other IRA members, Fergus takes her to her hair salon and cuts her hair short. He’d have her without makeup and dressed in Jody’s old cricket clothes. This removal of her feminine trappings thus strips her of her sexual power, not only depriving Dil of the femininity she wants to be able to express to the world, but also of what makes her feel desirable to him, thus making her feel especially insecure and vulnerable to his leaving her.

There is thus more Samson symbolism here, in Dil’s loss of power through her haircut from her–as she suspects–male Delilah, for she fears that he’ll betray her and leave her. In another reversal of sex roles, her dressing like Jody is what, from a transwoman’s point of view, would truly feel like cross-dressing. Still, her dressing like Jody must feel like, from Fergus’s point of view, his successful protecting of Jody where he previously failed to do so.

This Samson and Delilah symbolism brings up some important themes in The Crying Game, including loyalty vs betrayal, and having vs lacking the strength to fight one’s enemies. Samson eventually grows his hair back, the source of his strength, and defeats his enemies. He’s betrayed by Delilah, as Jody is betrayed by Jude, and Dil–jealous that Jude is about to steal “Jimmy” from her–fears his betrayal. But the greatest betrayal of all, though not properly reflected on by the average viewer of this film, is Fergus’s betrayal of Ireland, and his weak caving in to the UK through Jody and Dil, as symbolized by his haircut.

Fergus finally tells Dil, who’s drunk and in her flat, about the IRA plot to kidnap and kill Jody, and Fergus’s involvement in the plot. So betrayed does she feel by “Jimmy” that, while he’s asleep on her bed, she ties his hands and feet to the bedposts; she also takes out a pistol. Since he can’t shoot the judge now, Peter does it instead and gets killed by the judge’s security. Jude goes over with her pistol to Dil’s flat to confront Fergus.

Dil is in a most ironic situation here: a transwoman dressed like a man and thus feeling symbolically (though, of course, not literally) castrated, that is, having lost her sexual power. Still, with that phallic pistol in her hands and pointing it at Jude, she’s as much a phallic woman (!) as armed Jude is in a symbolic sense.

Knowing that Delilah-Jude used “those tits and that arse” to lure Jody in, Dil shoots and kills her. Fergus, however, takes the blame for the murder and goes to jail so Dil can go free.

It’s interesting how, in this confrontation between Dil and Jude, we see a case of strong women–be they cis or trans, it doesn’t matter–as part of a camouflaging of and a distraction from anti-imperialist struggle, just as the issues of prejudice against blacks and LGBT people have been used as such camouflage in this film. As I said above, eradicating capitalist imperialism–and its alienating divisiveness–is the best way to ensure an enduring protection for these people against these prejudices, but liberals wish to maintain the privileges of that imperialism while pretending to care about eradicating those prejudices–hence, this film.

Indeed, how does the film end?…with an Irishman in jail for a murder of an Irishwoman committed by a UK citizen. His sacrifice is seen by Dil as a Christ-like love (John 15:13), and Christ was crucified for having attempted to rise up against Roman imperialism, by the way. As far as other relevant Biblical references are concerned, when Dil visits Fergus in jail several months later, we see her hair growing back, like Samson’s–she’s getting her power back.

Now, remember, a British armoured vehicle is what actually hit and killed Jody, not any of the IRA, who were fighting to liberate Ireland from British imperialism. All the IRA agents in the film are dead. Fergus has given up his liberty to save that of a Brit.

The real crying game of this film thus is how sympathy is generated for marginalized people–blacks and LGBT people–which is in itself perfectly warranted, but done so here at the expense of an historically victimized people whose side of the story is never told, not even in passing. The Irish are the truly marginalized people in The Crying Game: denigrated, vilified…never heard.

“The Historiography of Rwanda 30 Years after 1994,” from Dennis Riches’s Blog

As Riches concludes in this article, the Rwandan genocide “was a war that also involved several powerful military forces and governments from outside of Africa supporting the RPF [the exiled Tutsi army] to overthrow the Rwandan government and playing the long game for control of Central Africa, particularly the Congo.”

The Historiography of Rwanda 30 Years after 1994

Who Runs the World?

I: Introduction

No, I’m not correcting Beyoncé’s grammar.

I’m talking about something serious here.

Several weeks before the publishing of this post, I posted a meme on Facebook that says, “Once you learn a sufficient amount of history you must choose to become either a Marxist or a liar”.

A FB friend of mine expressed a sharp disagreement with this message, saying that Marx was a third or fourth cousin of Nathan Meyer, 1st Lord Rothschild [!], and that the latter was “the father of capitalism” [?]. Her source was a book called The Jewish Journey, by Edward Gelles.

According to her, this Gelles originally studied in Oxford University, but later became an independent researcher; which suggests that the academic establishment in Oxford have rejected his ideas as crackpot ones. Now, as an independent researcher myself, I’m no fan of conformist establishment academia, but saying that any one man ‘fathered’ capitalism (if anyone, that was Adam Smith, 1723-1790), as if sprung fully grown from his forehead (assuming Gelles called Meyer capitalism’s “father,” rather than my friend), and polemically linking (Jewish) Marx with the (Jewish) Rothschilds sounds like junk history to me.

Granted, my own grasp of history has more than its share of gaps, but even I won’t oversimplify economic history by claiming that the capitalist mode of production began with one man. Capitalism gradually grew, over a period of centuries within feudalism through merchants (i.e., mercantile capitalism). Marx, in his writing of The Communist Manifesto, was arguably the first theoretician of communism, though there were a host of socialists before him. Capitalism’s beginnings predate Meyer, born in 1840, by many decades.

Personally, I couldn’t care less if a British banker of German descent is connected by blood to Marx; this link, if it’s at all true (and I seriously doubt it), could be explained by the fact that there were small numbers in the said Ashkenazi Jewish community, and with that, the high level of close relatives’ marriages. What’s being implied by this link, though, reeks to high heaven of the old Nazi conspiracy theory known as Judeo-Bolshevism. The Nazis themselves made the Marx/Rothschilds link, which according to Gelles is well-known, casting doubt on the idea that this ‘history’ has been suppressed, as my FB friend imagines it to be.

Just because two people stem from the same family doesn’t mean that they have the same, or even remotely comparable, views on anything, a fact that should go without saying, and one that even my FB friend acknowledged in her comments. Yet many people seem to think that all members of a family, or of a certain tribe–as such paranoiacs would call it–must have the same ideology, or the same political agenda, while their scheme might involve presenting that unity in the form of differences and variations that are only superficial.

If this supposed family link is true and has been suspiciously suppressed, I don’t find it difficult to see why. As I said above, the Nazis made this Marx/Rothschilds link, and such propaganda led to the murder of six million Jews. What needs to be remembered today is that fascism has been coming back in style: liberals have been defending Ukrainian Nazis, minimizing, if not outright denying, their influence in the politics of the area in a way comparable to Holocaust denial; far-right groups have made gains all over Europe; and with this knowledge, I find it easy to believe that some academics with secret fascist sympathies can sneak spurious details into their books.

Israeli atrocities in Gaza are stirring up lots of bad feeling against Jews. The fact that this genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinians is so indefensible is all the more reason to be careful about using the rage we feel, justified as it is in itself, to generalize unfairly about all the Jews of the world, many of whom are as opposed to what the Zionists are doing as everyone else is. For if we do that generalizing, and go around repeating the old paranoid antisemitic slanders about Jews secretly controlling the world, that paranoia could very well result in another Holocaust, the very thing we promised would never happen again.

II: Ancient Antisemitism

The history of antisemitism that I’m summarizing here is far from exhaustive. I’m just touching on a few highlights that I consider relevant for the sake of my argument.

The earliest known examples of antisemitism come from ancient Egypt and Greece. A particularly noteworthy source at the time was Gnosticism, since it influenced Christianity. The Gnostics came to equate Yahweh–the creator of the physical world, and perceived as being angry, judgmental, and overly-legalistic–with the principle of darkness and materiality, as opposed to the principle of light and the spirit.

Gnosticism posited a dualistic universe in which the good principle of light and the spirit is at war with the evil principle of darkness and matter. It isn’t difficult to translate these ideas into the Christian God being at war with Satan…except that the Gnostics tended to equate Yahweh with the Demiurge, an evil or at least inferior god who created the physical world. It also isn’t difficult to see where New Testament verses like 2 Corinthians 4:4 and John 8:44–in which the Devil is portrayed as a ‘god’ and as the ‘father’ of the Jews, respectively–come from as ideas.

My point behind mentioning all of this is that it establishes not only the association of the Jews with the Devil, but also with the rule of the Earth. We can see here just how much of antisemitism is based on superstitious, religious nonsense, not on anything remotely scientific.

It has been noted in a number of sources that the Gospel According to John has strong Gnostic tendencies, if not being outright Gnostic in essence. The Gnostics, as I pointed out above, were strongly antisemitic, and the Gospel of John carries antisemitism to greater lengths than the Synoptics do. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the object of Jesus’ moral condemnation is the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (for example, Matthew 23 and Luke 11:37-53). In John, it’s “the Jews” in general who are judged, as seen in John 8:44 and John 7:13.

That all four Gospels worked to shift the blame for the killing of Christ away from the real perpetrators, the Roman authorities, and onto the Jews (see Matthew 27:25), in order to make it easier for the early Church to win over Roman converts, was the Biblical basis for Christian antisemitism over the past two thousand years. That the man who betrayed Jesus for thirty silver pieces was named Judas Iscariot should tell you something. (Read Hyam Maccoby‘s The Mythmaker and Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil for more details.)

We can see in these early New Testament portrayals of the Jews, as linked to the Devil, the god of this age (thanks to the Gnostics), and as having betrayed Christ for money, how such antisemitic slanders as ‘Jewish greed,’ the ‘Jewish genius at making money (i.e., the ‘fathers of capitalism’),’ and the ‘Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world’ (i.e., the ‘fathers of communism’) originated in religious superstition, not fact.

III: Medieval Antisemitism and Money-lending

Of course, the stereotypes of Jewish greed and uncanny talent at making money are not based solely on religious beliefs. Jews in medieval, Christian-dominated Europe made a living largely as tax and rent collectors, and of course as money-lenders. The antisemite believes Jews did this kind of work, considered morally despicable, because it’s in their nature to do such work; the informed reader of history, however, knows that the European medieval Jew did this kind of work because he wasn’t allowed to do much of any other kind of profession.

The Jewish faith itself frowns upon usury just as any other faith does. Still, many have thought of the lending of money at immorally excessive rates of interest as synonymous with being Jewish.

While The Merchant of Venice has often been staged and interpreted as antisemitic (one need only look at productions of the play in Nazi Germany to see how obvious this fact is), it could also be interpreted as simply commenting on the reality of antisemitism. Going against the money-loving stereotype, Shylock would rather have a pound of Antonio‘s flesh than take twice the amount of the original loan; his wish for that flesh, as reprehensible as it may be, is also understandable given the horrendous abuse Shylock has suffered throughout the play, just because he is a Jew.

Now, when the Enlightenment came about around the 18th century, which resulted in the Jewish emancipation from frequently-impoverished ghettos (a fact that knocks a few holes in the ‘rich Jew’ myth), job restrictions, and the like, some Jews became bankers, like the Rothschilds, which leads me to my next point.

IV: The Rothschilds

I’m perfectly aware of the many things out there published on YouTube, etc., claiming that the Rothschild family essentially controls everything: the banks, the media, world governments, and that they’re behind all the wars and political upheavals of the past few hundred years. Just because a nut here, or a nut there, says these things online and presents a pile of ‘evidence’ doesn’t make these claims true, though.

The Rothschilds, some being wealthy bankers, are capitalists. It’s their embrace of capitalism, not their Jewishness, that should be the basis of any criticism of them. While they were much wealthier and more influential back in the nineteenth century, they’d lost much of this preeminence since WWII, when the Nazis confiscated so much of their wealth and property. They’re far from being the world’s wealthiest family now.

The roots of the notion of this family’s ‘Satanic’ influence on world events are in a pamphlet written by someone calling himself “Satan,” of all pseudonyms. He was actually an antisemite named Mathieu Georges Dairnvael who in 1846 wrote about Nathan Rothschild being in Belgium at the time of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Learning of the outcome of the battle early, Nathan rushed across the North Sea in a storm to get to London twenty-four hours before Wellington’s messenger could and play the stock market with this knowledge, thus amassing twenty million francs, or a million sterling.

He and his brothers allegedly sold government consols cheaply, and once the prices had dropped, they made massive purchases.

There’s only one problem with this story.

It’s utter unsubstantiated bullocks.

Nathan Rothschild was in neither Wellington nor in Belgium at the time. There was no storm on the water between Belgium and England. He made no great killing on the stock market, either.

Still, Dairnvael’s canard spread all over the place, got translated into many languages, and gained such a hold on history that it’s been referred to in popular culture and scholarly works. Films were made about the story, in Hollywood in 1934, and, surprise, surprise, in a Nazi propaganda film in 1940, called The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo.

Alterations were made to the story when parts of it were disproven, such as Nathan’s not being in Waterloo, with such changes as the use of a carrier pigeon or special messenger to get the news to him first while he was in London. Hence, the tenacity of the canard to this day, in combination with antisemites’ tenacity.

Furthermore, Nathan wasn’t the only one to get early news of the outcome of the battle; and he had time to buy shares, apparently, but he couldn’t have had enough holdings, in the thin market of the day, to earn the millions he supposedly earned. He may have done well, but numerous rival investors did far better than he.

In any case, if people on the far right can rant and rave about evil bankers, so can leftists, including one claimed to have been blood-related to the Rothschilds: “In the fierce articles that Marx penned in 1849-1850, published in The Class Struggle in France, he took offense at the way Louise-Napoleon Bonaparte‘s new minister of finance, Achille Fould, representing bankers and financiers, peremptorily decided to increase the tax on drinks in order to pay rentiers their due.” (Piketty, page 132) The subject of this quote now leads us to my next topic.

V: Of Marx and Marxists

Though Karl Marx was ethnically a Jew, his family had converted to Christianity, and as an atheist, he rejected all religion, Christian and Jewish alike, as “the opium of the people.”

What’s more, defying the stereotype of the rich Jew, the fact remains that Marx was a poor man, often in debt. Because of his revolutionary activity, he had to hide from the authorities, often using pseudonyms. He was kicked out of Germany in 1843, and from his move to England in 1849 to his death in 1883 as a stateless man, he was in a state of abject poverty, having to live off the charity of his friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels.

The next thing we must ask is, what is Marxism? We should start by discussing what Marxism is not. It isn’t about edgy young people spiking their hair and dying it pink, wearing body piercing and tattoos, and griping at people who address them with the wrong pronouns. Some of these people may be Marxists, or they may have a smattering of the influence of Marxism, but as such, they don’t constitute the essence of Marxism. Such people are far more likely to be radlibs, who shouldn’t be confused with Marxists, even if there’d be some overlap of the two groups on a Venn diagram. People on the far right tend to think that anyone even a few millimetres to the left of them, including the centre-left liberal, is a ‘commie.’ Ridiculous.

On the other side of the coin, Marxists are sincerely concerned with the plight of the poor, and we’re trying to work out the best solutions possible to the problem of that plight, hence scientific socialism. We aren’t part of some grand Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

I bring up these two examples of what we’re not, caricatured as they may be, as a rebuttal of the ignorant nonsense many on the right believe about us. Marxism isn’t radicalism for its own sake. It isn’t utopian. And it isn’t a plot for world domination. Marxism is economics; it’s a theory about capitalism. It’s dull, dry, and difficult to understand in its statistical detail.

Another important aspect of Marxism is what’s called dialectical and historical materialism. This is derived from Hegel’s dialectic, popularly (though not by Hegel himself) represented as “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” and understood in terms of philosophical idealism (everything has a spiritual basis), which Marx turned upside-down (or right-side up, as Marx would have had it–Marx, page 102-103) as a form of philosophical materialism (everything has a material basis).

A lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists, including those who believe in the NWO, grossly oversimplify the dialectic by characterizing the above triad as “problem, reaction, solution,” making it into a diabolical formula that the ‘elite,’ or the ‘deep state’ uses to justify bringing in more and more tyrannical legislation. I assure you, Dear Reader, the dialectic, be it Hegel’s or Marx’s version, is much more general and more broadly applied than that.

The dialectic is about reconciling contradictory opposites–theoretically any opposites. In his Science of Logic, Hegel used the example of Being, Nothingness, and Becoming to show how opposites can be sublated and therefore resolved (Hegel, pages 82-83). He used it to show how ideas in philosophy can be refined for better logical thinking. A proposition is negated in order to have the conflicting ideas resolved in a sublation, which is in turn negated and sublated to create an even better idea to be negated and sublated, and so on and so on…

Marx, on the other hand, showed how contradictions have been resolved in the physical world throughout history, in particular, the contradiction between the rich and the poor (“the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles“). First, there was the ancient slave/master contradiction, which was keenly felt in the old slave revolts led by men like Spartacus. This got sublated into feudalism, which gave us the next major contradiction, that of the feudal lords vs. the poor peasants. The tensions of that conflict climaxed in such events as the French Revolution, whose sublation led to our current contradiction, that of the bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat–capitalism.

It is predicted that our current conflict will be sublated into a socialist revolution, with the dictatorship of the proletariat (a workers’ state, which is a government of the vast majority of the people, also called real democracy) leading to the withering away of the state and the ultimate goal, communist society–a classless, stateless, and money-less society.

Note how with each “problem, reaction, solution,” the world gets better and better, not worse and worse. If I’m wrong, maybe the right-wingers would prefer feudalism or ancient slavery. Of course, they’ll never think the world will get better by going my way, because thanks to the Cold War, anti-communist propaganda for which this very political right is responsible, my way is portrayed as “extremist” and “Satanic.”

And this “Satanic” agenda is perceived by the far right as dominating world politics, rather than mainstream liberalism, since far too few people today can distinguish the left from mere liberals. Added to the right’s paranoia of “Satanism” in today’s politics is a paranoia of Jewish influence in politics, just as the Nazis had a paranoid belief that a huge percentage of the members of the Bolshevik Party were Jews, when actually far fewer than even ten percent of party members, as well as those on the Central Committee, for example, were ethnic Jews in the 1920s.

Believing Jews dominate extreme capitalism (when actually, it was the Nazis and other fascists who represented this extreme) and the far left is a typical far-right mentality. Imagining Marx was related by blood to the Rothschild family is surely a part of that mentality. Fascists may portray their ideology as theoretically a ‘third position‘ between capitalism and communism, but in practice theirs is a violent defence of the former. Beware of people who claim to be ‘neither left nor right.’ These people are rightists–libertarians, ‘Third Way‘ politicians, and Bonapartists.

VI: On Zionism

Now, I’ve been doing a whole lot of defending Jews against antisemitism, which is necessary, especially in today’s world, with the current resurgence of fascist tendencies in many parts of the world. This defence of mine, however, needn’t and mustn’t necessitate a defence of the racist, apartheid, settler-colonialism of Israel. For Zionism is a form of fascism.

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, as long as one’s criticism and moral condemnation of Israel’s oppression and victimization of the Palestinians isn’t rooted in the kind of bigoted nonsense I was describing above. If we don’t want Zionists to play the antisemitism card whenever we criticize Israeli brutality, we mustn’t describe that brutality in terms of “Well, they’re Jews! What do you expect?”

Though Israel is the Jewish state, the establishment and maintenance of Zionism is not exclusively or even essentially Jewish. Many critics of Zionism are Jews, including those who practice Judaism. Observant Jews believe that Zion is to be established by God with the coming of the Messiah; man is thus forbidden to establish it secularly.

Many Jews, whether religious or not, have always condemned the creation of Israel on moral grounds, feeling compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians. Some of these Jews are famous: Einstein, Noam Chomsky, etc. To condemn Israel is to be human, not to be anti-Jewish. It’s about loving the Palestinians, not hating the Jews. Listen to Norman Finkelstein‘s passionate advocacy for the Palestinians to see my point. The younger generations of Jews, tending to be more politically progressive, are more critical of Israel than the older generations.

Furthermore, many non-Jews are pro-Zionist, including many evangelical Christians. Biden, a Catholic, has openly, proudly declared his support for Israel, as any American politician (who doesn’t want to kill his or her career) will do. Trump, the ‘antiestablishment president,’ is blatantly Zionist: recall his moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the latter being deemed Israel’s new capital; this move infuriated the Palestinians, of course, and for very good reason (it happened on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba), and their protests resulted in the IDF shooting and killing a great many unarmed Palestinians along the Gaza border. It’s the kind of thing that helps us understand why Hamas exists.

The motives of those Western leaders, who set up the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, were not exactly innocent, by the way. These non-Jewish pro-Zionists were acting out of antisemitic interests–they wanted to use Zion as a way of getting rid of the Jews in their own countries. Recall that at the time, decades before the Holocaust, anti-Jewish prejudice was a common and accepted attitude.

So, why is Israel so important to the Western ruling class? They may rationalize it as a form of atonement for how two millennia of European antisemitism culminated in the Holocaust. Yet if this Western guilt was among the main reasons for backing Zionism, then why did the West, right around the time of the creation of Israel, also not only pardon many ex-Nazis, but also give them high-paying, high-status jobs in the American and West German governments, as well as in NASA and NATO? We have to look elsewhere for that reason, and that elsewhere is imperialism.

Let’s go back to the question that is the title of this article. Many people believe, because of the large Jewish lobby in American politics (AIPAC), that Israel rules the US, and therefore the world, too. The hidden spark of truth behind this antisemitic slander is that the US, the capitalist, imperialist country par excellence, is what actually runs the world.

Seriously: Israel, a tiny sliver of land that’s barely seven miles wide at its narrowest point, with a population of just over nine million–as against a global population of just over eight billion–rules the world, just because those nine million are ‘God’s chosen people’ (translation: the Demiurge’s, or Devil’s, chosen people)? We can see how paranoid anti-Jew fantasies have been kept alive from ancient times by being passed down through our collective unconscious.

American support for Israel is much more rooted in Christian Zionism than in Jewish Zionism. It isn’t that Israel controls the US and the West in general, but vice versa. Christian Zionists, who at least veer dangerously close to, if they don’t completely immerse themselves in, outright fundamentalism, believe that the establishment and maintenance of Israel will speed up the End Times, the Rapture, etc. Then the Bible-thumpers can go up to heaven faster and look down on us unrepentant sinners as we burn in Hell, and they can laugh at us for not accepting Jesus as our personal saviour. How charming.

But religious nonsense aside, there’s a much more pertinent reason that the political right (which of course includes the religious right) supports Israel. The Western capitalist class needs a political ally in the geo-strategically crucial Middle East, and that ally is Israel. There’s a lot of oil in that general area, and the global ruling class needs to have a foothold there for the sake of having political leverage.

Back in the mid- to late 1940s, the Soviet Union recognized the geo-strategic importance of the area, and so regrettably they–in an act of realpolitik—gave some support to the establishment of Israel, hoping it would be a socialist state and an ally during the beginning Cold War. Since socialists have always been anti-Zionists, this brief Soviet support was a momentary lapse of reason, and when it became clear that, despite the socialist leanings of the kibbutzim, Israel would be a bourgeois state, allied with the US, the Soviet government repented of their support and thenceforth remained in total solidarity with the Arabs.

Having global power is based on the ownership of huge masses of wealth and land, not some Satanic Jewish mojo. Look at Israel on a map: it’s tiny. The US, in contrast, has military bases around the world. Israel has been able to defeat its Arab neighbours in numerous wars because of the military and financial aid of the US, the truly powerful country. The US helps Israel because Israel helps the US…and the imperialistic interests of the Anglo/American/NATO alliance.

The West uses Israel to help protect their lucrative oil interests (surely part of why Israel has a ‘secret’ supply of nukes), and so Israel can kick some ass if needed. When Israel does this dirty work, they get scapegoated so the West won’t get blamed (or only minimally blamed). It’s a perfect system for the Western powers.

VII: Conclusion

Now, with all of that said, I must conclude with a bold statement, bluntly given, and which may offend some: Israel should not exist. Let me put this statement in its proper context. As a Canadian, I also believe that Canada should not exist. The United States should not exist. Neither Australia nor New Zealand should exist. The same goes for all the other nation-states of the world founded on settler colonialism.

Does this mean we should kick all the newcomers out of their respective countries? No. As I would have it, negotiations would be made between the indigenous peoples on the one side and the settlers on the other, within the context of these places being federations of socialist communities rather than the bourgeois states that they are currently. Full, equal civil rights would be granted to everyone, regardless of race, colour, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation or identity, ability/disability, etc. But the land would be understood to be that of the indigenous people. No one would have the right, for example, to construct a gas pipeline on land deemed sacred to the aboriginals.

The same principles should be applied to Palestine, the one and only state that should exist in that area. Jewish communities should be allowed to live there and be given full, equal civil rights, but the land belongs to the Palestinians: it’s to be for Palestinian Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc., equally. The Jews there should no longer have hegemony over the land.

As for all of that antisemitic nonsense, though, I must say that I find it deeply disturbing that so many people out there, including many well-intentioned ones, have confused Nazi propaganda with some kind of ‘deep, arcane, and forbidden knowledge.’ I’d say the promotion of these ideas is yet another indication of the unsettling resurgence of fascism in today’s world. I’d like to be charitable and say that I’m sure that my FB friend, in believing all of that Rothschild nonsense, is not a Nazi sympathizer, but rather just someone who isn’t as well-informed as she thinks she is.

And this all brings us back to the message of that meme I mentioned in the Introduction: are you, or are you not, sufficiently knowledgeable of history? If you are, perhaps you aren’t convinced that you must be either a Marxist or a liar. Fair enough. But those who do know enough about history, and who also present Nazi propaganda as fact, are liars through and through. They’re also truly despicable people.

Oh, and describing oneself as having Jewish blood while believing in this Nazi nonsense doesn’t exempt one from this criticism. Zelenskyy being a Jew doesn’t in itself disprove that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian government and military, though many liberals in the media try to make that argument; there were Jews who fought for Nazi Germany; there’s Israel’s support of the Ukrainian Nazis; and finally, there are those bizarre things Netanyahu said about the Holocaust.

Now, anyone out there who objects to my judgements about the Nazi narratives, and wants to rant at me in the comment section about how the Rothschild conspiracy theories are ‘true,’ and how the Jews are supposedly behind the birth of both capitalism and communism, go ahead and present links to your ‘proof.’ Deny your Nazi sympathies all you want, but the only thing you’ll be accomplishing is outing yourself to the world as a Nazi. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

The fact is, the rulers of the world aren’t any particular ethnic group, merely because they’re of that ethnicity. Such thinking isn’t only irrational, it’s also a political distraction from the real root of the problem. The global capitalist class runs the world, through their vast wealth, political and media influence, and ownership of land. To be sure, some of them are Jews, but many of them aren’t. In any case, it isn’t their Jewishness or non-Jewishness that matters.

There’s only one minority we need to distrust: the rich.

Tents

Camping
is supposed to be
for people who are on
vacation, not the homeless.

High rents
can toss you out
of buildings, and into
tents, but so can bombers.

There are
camps for the
summer, and there
are concentration camps.

You are
in the open air,
& yet still, you are
trapped, just like rats.

Rows of
tents replace
the homes of Gaza.
Zion’s a cruel landlord.