The Shaping of the Axis
Since the neocons in the White House began dominating US foreign policy in 2001/2002, America has mutated from a country that was, for the most part, admired and respected as the world’s number one superpower, into a rogue global purveyor of weapons, war and destruction that is now both distrusted and disliked by a majority of the world’s population.
The US is now seen by most of the non-Western World, and a growing portion of the Western world, as a global scourge that cloaks its greed and its duplicitous penchant for violence in the guise of spreading neoliberal democracy. This is how most of the world now perceives us. This is one small aspect of what our corporately controlled Western legacy mainstream media hasn’t been showing us.
Over the last two decades, led by neocon ideologues like Donald Rumsfeld (R), Dick Cheney (R), Hillary Clinton (D), and Victoria Nuland (D), the US has largely phased out diplomacy from its approach to foreign policy in favor of supremacist rhetoric, polarizing mainstream legacy media propaganda and threats of economic and/or military intervention.
Noncompliance with these threats has been followed by unprovoked invasions of one sort or another in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. If not by direct invasion then by proxy occupations like those in Ukraine, in different parts of Africa, and the smattering of military bases and interventions that are in operation now in and around the continent of Asia. We’re talking now about a growing total of well over 800 US military bases, worldwide. (1)(1a)
The US’ Two Key Allies
The US’ two main allies during these twenty years of decadence, intervention, and destruction have been Israel in the Middle East and the UK in Europe. Up until very recently these three nations, with the US at the helm, have comprised what has essentially been an axis of unchecked power.
This alliance is now fueled by the US’ desperation to hang on to its global hegemony and by Israel and the UK’s economic and military dependence on the US. This association is also fed by an obstinate myopic nostalgia, an ignorance that has proliferated throughout both political parties within the top tiers of government in the US, arguably since the end of the Cold War.
This antiquated ideology, this outdated neoconservative vision of the world doesn’t accept the fact that nations outside of the Western sphere, countries that make up a majority of this planet’s population, have grown and changed dramatically in recent years. Neoconservatism is a bipartisan fundamentalist ideology that resists global cooperation with non-NATO/non-Western nations in an attempt to maintain a world order that has been collapsing, arguably for the better part of the last decade and a half.
The nonWestern global majority (China, India, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, much of South America, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc.) has grown considerably in economic power, resources, military might, and solidarity over the last ten to twenty years. In short, the non-Western world can no longer be bullied by the US in the way that it has been throughout the last thirty to thirty-five years.
In this article, I will discuss a few key aspects of the current global crisis that the Axis of Ignorance has been largely responsible for generating.
The Biden Administration’s Boomerang
There’s a new joke, a meme that has proliferated throughout many of Russia’s major cities over the last six months. The meme is “Thank You Joe Biden!” (2) This is how huge the boomerang effect of the US and NATO’s attempt to damage Russia over the last twenty-two months has been.
Russia’s military fortitude, its current economic prospects, and its overall standing as a nation of power and consequence have all grown considerably over the last two years. Ironically, Russia’s growth has been paralleled by The US and Europe’s plunge into inflation, recession, and global humiliation. (3)
A Failure from Every Conceivable Perspective
Just a few months ago in the US, in the UK, and in many other Western nations it was considered almost sacrilegious to utter any of the above-mentioned facts. Throughout 2022 and most of 2023, to say that Russia was winning the war in Ukraine was to risk being labeled a “Putin Puppet” and/or a “Russian Kool-Aid Drinker”. I had both monikers hurled at me on more than one occasion.
Many people were censored, ostracized, and in some cases de-platformed and silenced for suggesting that the Western media’s narrative about what was taking place in Ukraine was problematic and, to a large extent, untrue.
By the end of 2023 though, the discrepancy between the reality of what was taking place in Ukraine and what the Western media was presenting as the reality became so glaring that their narrative simply collapsed under the weight of its massive contradictions.
Corporate media giants like Time Magazine (4), The NY Times (5), The Washington Post (6), and even politicians like Joe Biden himself (7) have all had to begin to admit that the US and NATO’s attempt to force regime change and to cause damage to Russia by continually escalating and prolonging the war in Ukraine, has been a complete failure from every conceivable perspective.
Mind you, none of these facts absolve Russia from its responsibility for the destruction that it has carried out on the battlefield in Ukraine. Just as Russia’s actions do not absolve the US’ from its responsibility for the damage and death it has wrought by blocking all attempts at negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in 2022 and its insistence that Ukraine fight on despite its dismal prospects of anything resembling victory.
The Human Tragedy That Unnecessarily Persists in Ukraine
As was alluded to above, possibly the most reprehensible aspect of the current 2022 – 2024 phase of the decade-old Ukraine-Russia-US debacle is that since the undeniable failure of Ukraine’s Spring/Summer 2023 counter-offensive, it has been widely known, and very certainly known in Western upper-governmental circles, that Ukraine has absolutely no chance of victory.
Despite this knowledge, the US, with its NATO operatives trailing, has not attempted to stop the war via some form of negotiated settlement. Instead the Western powers, in a troubling attempt to save face, have continued to back the suicide of the rest of Ukraine’s battle-eligible population. (8) This utterly immoral, purposeless waste of human life continues to go on as you read these words, even though the majority of Ukraine’s population now knows that victory over Russia is all but impossible. (9)
The Preamble to October 7th
During Benjamin Netanyahu’s fifteen-year reign as Israel’s Prime Minister, Gaza has been an open-air prison camp for Palestinians. Over the last two decades the 2.2 million Palestinians who have lived in Gaza have been subjected to unabashed seasonal “Lawn Mowings” (the periodic bombing, displacement, torture, and murder of Palestinians to keep them in perpetual fear) by Israel, along with constant house searches, perpetual humiliations and false arrests.
Many of these false arrests have been of children who have now spent over a decade in Israeli prisons. (10) For twenty years the Palestinian population has not been allowed to leave or re-enter Gaza. Two decades of captivity riddled with poverty, joblessness, hunger, and no prospects for future change.
It was these conditions that eventually ended up spurring Hamas’ undeniably brutal military attack on October 7th, 2023. An attack that took the lives of 695 Israeli civilians and 373 Israeli security forces officers.
Israel is Carrying Out a US Approved Genocide
Israel is currently carrying out a revenge-inspired, genocidal attack on the civilian population of Gaza and portions of the West Bank. Over the past three months, Israel has killed at least 23,000 Palestinians, 70% of the dead being women, children, and babies. (11)
In the first four weeks of Israel’s attack on Gaza, more civilians were killed than in Russia’s two years of battle in Ukraine. Israel is killing civilians, journalists, UN aid workers, and health workers (well over 300 aid workers have been killed so far) and in some cases, their citizens. (12)
Israel is indiscriminately and disproportionately killing innocent women, children, men, and babies along with members of Hamas. There is simply no way around it. This is a genocide.
Israel’s Plan is Dumb, Dangerous, and Destined to Fail
It has been universally acknowledged by everyone with a modicum of intellectual honesty that Israel’s plan to “eliminate Hamas” by destroying everything and nearly everyone in Gaza is ridiculous, not to mention monstrously inhumane. (13) Add to this that, after suffering substantial casualties that spurred a withdrawal of about 5,000 of its troops this week, Israel’s plan to push Gaza’s Palestinian population into the Sinai peninsula is being met with resistance by Egypt.(14)
Egypt, whose military is dedicated solely to stability and who are effectively subject to US dictates, has been pushing hard against the possibility of the influx of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
Israel’s Recent Terrorist Rampage in the North
“Israel’s window for establishing military dominance in Gaza has closed”, US National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby said the other day. In response to these roadblocks, Israel has shifted its operation to the north, assassinating a key Hamas official named Saleh Arouri in his office in Southern Beirut yesterday. Arouri was one of the lead negotiators for the Israeli hostages, which makes it clear that the current Israeli leadership is barely if at all concerned with the well-being of the Israeli hostages.
Israel has also been carrying out terrorist bombings, one of them involving the mass slaughter of mourners at the grave sight of General Quasem Soleimani, two days ago in Iran. Eighty-four people were killed in this reckless unprovoked Israeli terrorist attack. (15)
In response to all of this, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens have begun what could turn out to be a mass exodus from Israel, depending on how dangerously dumb Netanyahu and his Zionist fundamentalist cohorts are willing to get with this current campaign of genocide and intermittent terrorism.
Make No Mistake About It
Make no mistake about it, Netanyahu and his fundamentalist colleagues are doing everything they possibly can to draw the US into this conflict, which they hope will expand into Iran and Lebanon.
Unfortunately, the war-horny neocons in the White House (who are also doing all they can to provoke Iran) and the spineless leadership in the UK just might be collectively reckless and unintelligent enough to make Netanyahu’s fever dream come true. Time will tell.
Add to this the fact that there are millions of Palestinians in Jordon (which is also on the brink of collapse) and other countries in the region that want to arm up and fight against Israel. (16)
Talk of a post-Israel Middle East is growing. Imagine a scenario in which Israel’s provocations produce the level of conflict that Netanyahu and his Zionist governmental associates seem to be pushing for. Israel wouldn’t stand a chance if the Muslim nations in the region were to unite to stomp them out.
This Is Where We’re At
This is where we’re at folks. And it has been neocon Joe Biden’s refusal to consult congress before exporting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel and his refusal to join in the near-unanimous global calls for a ceasefire in Gaza that are the primary reasons this dangerous escalation continues. (17)
It is the US’ green-lighting and funding of Israel’s genocide that is making its project of ethnic cleansing possible. Biden’s anti-diplomatic ineptitude is also fueling the growing potential for a new level of global conflict. This is the multi-pronged crisis that the Axis of Ignorance has created and that it seems to be doing all it can to maintain and/or accelerate.
Israel’s Apparent Misrepresentations of Events are Currently Being Thoroughly Vetted
Israel is not only conducting the first-ever campaign of live-streamed ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, apparently, they’re also carrying out a mass media campaign in collusion with the US, the UK, and other Western nations that is chocked full of sloppily concocted fabrications regarding what has and is now occurring in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank from October 7th up until the present moment. (18)
These misrepresentations of events that Israel has been disseminating are an attempt to justify their genocide in Gaza. These false reports are now being carefully vetted and exposed by several reputable sources encompassing a wide range of political points of view. Stay tuned for future updates on this matter.
In Conclusion, On a Personal Note
It’s difficult to put into words, the indignation I’ve been feeling of late. It’s as if the collective West, with the US at the helm, has been doing everything it can to push the world precisely in the most dangerous direction, that is most deadly. In its frantic attempts to hold on to its hegemony, the US and its partners have been dangerously accelerating the process of breakdown that the unipolar world was already going through. (19)
These frantically desperate attempts by the Axis of Ignorance to cling to an outdated form of global dominance are putting all life on this planet in more and more danger with each passing month. Whatever one’s political leanings may be, certainly, this is not the way forward. This path of increasing violence and burgeoning suffering is certainly an anti-evolutionary cul-de-sac that our human species has gotten itself caught in.
It’s time now for the US to let go of its penchant for unchallenged sovereignty. It’s time now for the nations of our world, despite our varying ideological leanings, our different religious and non-religious forms, and our nonidentical lifestyles, to begin to communicate and work together rather than trying to individually murder our way to global dominance.
Our homo-sapiens predecessors didn’t struggle to keep this species going for 233,000 years so that we’d end up in this absurd predicament. (20) A predicament full of technological wonders that are being used, primarily, to generate faster, better ways to kill each other.
In future articles, we will go more deeply into the possibilities for personal and collective transformation in these difficult times we are living in.
CITATIONS:
(1) https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3931076-heres-where-us-military-will-open-bases-in-the-philippines-in-move-to-counter-china/
(1a) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321/
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVEMFrFxW8
(3) https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/europes-problems-are-far-bigger-than-shallow-recession-2023-11-14/
(4) https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview/
(5) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/us/politics/us-ukraine-war-strategy.html
(6) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/13/ukraine-aid-united-states-european-union/
(7) https://thehill.com/video/biden-admits-ukraine-cannot-win-war-giving-up-territory-lt-col-davis-reacts/9286531/
(8) https://www.pressenza.com/2023/06/summer-of-suicide-2023/
(9) https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/27/switch-to-defence-ukraine-faces-difficult-2024-amid-aid-arms-setbacks
(10) https://time.com/6548068/palestinian-children-israeli-prison-arrested/
(11) https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15503.doc.htm
(12) https://www.map.org.uk/news/archive/post/1543-more-health-workers-killed-in-israelas-assault-on-gaza-than-all-countries-in-conflict-in-any-year-since-2016
(13) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/20/israel-battlefield-gaza-defeat-hamas/
(14) https://www.npr.org/2023/12/12/1218388766/egypt-israel-gaza-palestinians-hamas
(15) https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240104-iran-blames-israel-us-for-deadly-twin-blasts-near-grave-of-guards-general-soleimani
(16) https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-jordan-new-generation-wants-liberate
(17) https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hunger-rises-gaza-un-prepares-vote-ceasefire-resolution-2023-12-12/
(18) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXdCd8VPo4g&t=437s
(19) https://www.pressenza.com/2022/07/its-the-end-of-the-unipolar-world-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel/
(20) https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/researchers-date-the-oldest-known-human-skull-at-233000-years/
