Voyage of the Damned: Blowing Up Boats and Breaking Down Bullshit

Voyage of the Damned
Blowing Up Boats and Breaking Down Bullshit

Jim Kavanagh

Thug Life

The Trump administration campaign of killing boatmen in the waters near Venezuela, part of its larger project of regime change aggression against the country, breaks, and blatantly defies, the most fundamental principles of American and international law. It’s a crime, and all of its perpetrators, from the grotesque thug Hegseth, to any sub-thug Admiral, to any officer, airmen or seaman who pushes the fatal button, to the ur-thug commander-in-chief who encourages and is responsible for it, should be prosecuted and imprisoned.

Proudly exhibiting videos of small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters being blown to bits under the entirely unproven and entirely irrelevant claim that they were transporting drugs, killing at least 87 people so far, including  men who were clearly surrendering with their hands in the air and survivors clinging to wreckage, is not a good look. I hope the families of those killed, some of whose bodies have washed ashore, find a venue through which they can bring criminal charges against and/or sue the shit out of the United States Government and any and all of its personnel involved.

The thuggery here Is so blatant, and its perpetrators so stupid, that it’s elicited unwanted attention and reaction, including explicit discomfort from a Congress that’s for decades been extraordinarily and cowardly reluctant to impinge on Presidential war-making prerogatives. There’s been a congressional viewing of a double-tap video showing “two survivors, shirtless, cl[inging] to the upturned hull” of a wrecked boat before being blown up by a second strike ordered by Adm. Frank M. Bradley. According to the account of “two people with direct knowledge of the operation” cited by the Washington Post (and kinda-sorta challenged by others), Bradley was following a spoken directive by  Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody.” Predictably, Republican congressmen like Tom Cotton found the action “righteous” while Democratic congressmen found it “disturbing” and “troubling,” although they “declined to weigh in” on whether this strike actually “constituted a war crime.”

Speaking for the administration, Vice President J.D. Vance made clear the Trump administration’s contemptuous indifference to any consideration of American actions in relation to “war crime” and other such standards:

War crime, schmor crime. You can’t really think we bother about such things.

Of course, the whole debate about a double-tap second strike avoids and obscures the main point: Any strike on small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters is illegitimate on every level. It’s no more legal or ethical to blow up people in boats in the Caribbean you claim are carrying narcotics than it is to shoot down a guy on the street corner you claim has drugs in his pocket. Nobody with a brain takes this seriously. The whole blatantly deceitful boat-strike campaign is pure murder, part of a larger, blatant regime-change campaign against Venezuela that is pure imperialist aggression.

https://x.com/AdHaque110/status/1995816543884542075?s=20

Disobedient Spirits

One of the more contentious moments in all this came with the short video done by six Democratic lawmakers (Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Chrissy Houlahan, and Maggie Goodlander), all of whom were military or intelligence officers. Speaking “directly to members of the military and the intelligence community,” they warned them that “this administration is pitting our uniformed military intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” and reminded them that: “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our constitution.”

This admonition that military and intelligence personnel “can” and “must” refuse illegal order, provoked fury from Trump, who called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” although it’s a well-known, black-letter element of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—as his own Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court: “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders, It would be a crime to do so.” (my emphasis).

Indeed, Pete Hegseth himself knows and has clearly stated this legal standard: “The military’s not gonna follow illegal orders…If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief. There’s a standard. There’s an ethos.”

It’s just one of those standards that, once you get in power, you don’t give a shit about.

Nonetheless, we should recognize that it’s quite radical for sitting lawmakers to make such statements. When soldiers start disobeying orders en masse—which is exactly what the Democratic six are urging US soldiers and sailors to consider doing—things get seriously out of hand. Entire units and missions start to collapse under constant threat of mutiny. The last time mass refusal of orders happened seriously in the U.S. armed forces was in Vietnam, and it inevitably developed into situations where orders were refused with the toss of a grenade.

And that’s exactly the kind of thing you should expect and accept when an illegal order to commit a war crime or crime against humanity is issued, whether for a specific incident or a whole campaign—i.e., an imperialist aggression in Vietnam or Venezuela.

More pointed responses to the Democratic six are along the lines of “What illegal orders are you suggesting our troops have to disobey? Please don’t pretend you’re giving an abstract lesson in civics. You are former military and intelligence officers who obeyed every order you were given without question and have decided now to emphasize the necessity of disobeying illegal orders, in a discourse framed with urgency about what “this administration” is doing. Everybody knows you’ve got something specific in mind. Say it.

Pardon me for suspecting that these CIA and military Dems are not at all ready to accept the radical consequences of what they are advocating. Do all or any of these six want to be a little more concrete and say whether the military—every single member from the Admiral down to button pusher, the mass refusal you need to challenge a criminal military campaign—must refuse orders to blow up small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters (a more “completely unlawful and ruthless” order than which it’s hard to imagine)? Or will they continue “declining to weigh in”? Are they interested in encouraging and engaging in urgent, ethical, constitutional action that might actually disrupt a war crime in progress, or in rhetorically demonstrating how ethically, and constitutionally, and impotently cowardly concerned they are in contradistinction to their Republican colleagues? How much of a shit do they actually give?

Alumni Relations

Which brings me to another example of oh-so-concerned “oppositional” discourse that hit closer to home for me: the December 5th NYT op-ed, “What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes,” by Phil Klay. Klay is a former Marine and the winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his book of short stories about war, citizenship, and faith. As the LA Times puts it, he’s a Marine who’s “become more of a philosopher.” He is also an alumnus of the high school I went to, and I was alerted to his op-ed through my classmates’ mailing list.

I’ve written about Regis High School before, in my essay on Anthony Fauci, also an alumnus. I’ll repeat a bit here, because it informs Klay’s work and my response. Regis is a unique institution. It is an academically selective, full-scholarship (tuition-free), all-boys Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is widely considered the best Catholic high school (and one of the best overall) in the country. It gives a strong education, in my day literally classical—Homer and Caesar in the original Greek and Latin. It’s an education based on Catholic and Jesuit ethical values (which, of course, have changed over the years), and Klay is definitely engaged in an ongoing meditation on those values. It’s an education that, at its best, lays the foundation for logical and critical thinking, and prepares students for good liberal arts colleges and professional careers. For many middle-strata Catholic kids in New York—like this guy—it has been a life-changing experience. So, its alumni are unusually loyal, and proud and aware of each other’s accomplishments.

I caught a little more of the “critical” edge from that and subsequent education, and, as with Anthoy Fauci, my response to Klay’s column was less uncritical than the responses of my fellow alumni—such as, “Must read—not often do we get St. Augustine's advice in the New York Times!” and “Nothing less than what we should expect from a National Book Award recipient. Now if only the people reveling in Trump-sponsored gladiatorial matches would read it––and somehow internalize it.” 

Using a story from St. Augustine’s Confessions, Klay builds his essay on sharply and aptly analogizing the Trump administration’s “snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up” to the Romans’ “cruel gladiatorial games” that made the spectators “drink in savagery” and “imbibe madness,” turning them into the moral monsters that initially repelled them. This, we must consider, is “what President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation,” how his “moral shaping of the electorate” will leave us with results “we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.” This, “the Trump administration’s celebration of death” pushes beyond legal and constitutional questions, and “even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory.” It’s a “wounding of the national soul” that Klay finds “hard to watch.”

I’m right there with the “snuff film” critique of the Trump/Hegseth boat attacks; it’s the theologized fluff talk about Trump’s “wounding of the national soul” I find hard to swallow.

It’s fine and necessary to criticize the Trump administration for these crimes. It’s not fine to ignore—to deliberately and determinately fail to address and account for—the fact that, whatever “President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation,” that “soul” was ruined and damned long before Donald Trump came down the escalator.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, (both now Democratic Party favorites), Barack Obama, Hillary ”We came, we saw, he died. Ha, ha.”) and Bill Clinton, Madeline (*500,000* dead children “worth it”) Albright, Joe (“I am a Zionist”) Biden, etc. “morally shaped the electorate” and “wounded the national soul” to accept at-whim presidential assassinations, including double-taps.

What’s the point, besides demonstrating your theological-philosophical pretension finesse, of pinning the damnation of the American soul on Trump, who has yet to catch up with the body count of any of his forerunners?

I’ve characterized the present American polity a couple of times as a ship of fools. Even so, it was all-ahead-full for quite a while. But for some time now, under a succession of calamitous captains, we’ve been on a true voyage of the damned and, if we’re not blown out of the water (a real possibility), we will sink from the weight of the crimes we’ve committed against others and ourselves. If we even have time, we better figure out the personnel and baggage that got us here—all of it—and throw them overboard.

Klay makes a nice point about the result of 9/11: “Something dangerously seductive. America had found moral purpose again.  We can forget everything else, including why and how it happened, and embark on our purposeful and righteous campaign as the good guys, fighting the War on Terror.  Everyone, Phil Klay first of all, recognizes how disastrous that was. Substitute “Donald Trump” for “Terror” and you’ve got the liberal attitude since 2016, with at least the same level of righteous certitude.  How’s that working out?

Here's a couple of Obama’s extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassinations—aside from the murder of a 16-year-old American boy who “should’ve had a more responsible father”—per Amnesty International: “On a sunny afternoon in October 2012, 68-year-old Mamana Bibi was killed in a drone strike that appears to have been aimed directly at her.” And:2 “Earlier, on 6 July 2012, 18 male laborers, including at least one boy, were killed in a series of US drone strikes in the remote village of Zowi Sidgi. Missiles first struck a tent in which some men had gathered for an evening meal after a hard day’s work, and then struck those who came to help the injured from the first strike. Witnesses described a macabre scene of body parts and blood, panic and terror, as US drones continued to hover overhead.” Et. al. 

But we did not see those assassinations and double taps because, under Obama, “The USA…refuses to release detailed information about individual strikes.”  We didn’t see them because Obama and his “priest”/consigliere John Brennan were not as stupid as Trump and Hegseth to show it and boast about. Not as stupid, but no less culpable.

We didn’t see it because the Democratic-aligned media did not make sure you saw it and did not make a case out of it, but, rather, wrote positive, appreciative stories in Phil-Klay terms about the Augustinian angst of these morally complex protagonists.

The “priest” reference is not flippant. In 2012, the New York Times did a revealing  portrait of Obama and Brennan’s intimate pas de deux executing deadly extrajudicial and extraterritorial drone strikes via their Tuesday Kill List meetings. It was a relationship saturated with the same kind of theological and moral anguish, in exactly the same terms, that Phil Klay embraces. Obama was “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” John Brennan was “a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the ‘just war’ theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict...Guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama …signs off on every [drone] strike.”

Isn’t it so much better, didn’t it leave the soul of the nation unwounded, when, unlike the crude and stupid duo of Trump and Hegseth, the educated, erudite team of Obama and Brennan conjured up a “blessing” from Christian philosophers before blowing up civilians in distant lands? That’s the kind of morally anguished and self-aware leadership we Americans, and the Mamana Bibis and Venezuelan fishermen of the world, are missing.

Of course, with the hectic pace of operations and all, the Obama-Brennan disputationes had to be rather brief, since Obama “approves lethal action without hand-wringing.” Obama, you see, is “a realist who was never carried away by his lies own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.”

“Lawyerly mind” (or perhaps “Jesuitical”), “carving out [from “just war” theories] maneuvering room.” Isn’t that precious? In other words, all the theologizing moral anguish was bullshit cover for Obama acting as the dedicated, deadly American exceptionalist and imperialist and Zionist (‘cause that’s a huge part of Iraq, et. al.) that he was, that Trump is, and that anyone whom the ruling class permits to become the American president will be. It’s not “the Trump administration” that started imperialist America’s “celebration of death.”

No Favorite

Obama’s extrajudicial, extraterritorial assassination policy indisputably paved the way for Trump’s boat attacks, just as Obama’s 2015 designation of Venezuela as an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" paved the way for Trump’s (or whoever’s) possible military attack.

Here’s what I wrote about this, in a 2013 essay, when Jesuit Fr. Joe McShane, then president of Fordham University—John Brennan’s and my undergraduate alma mater—awarded Brennan an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters against the protest of  otherwise “morally shaped” students and former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, also a Fordham alumnus (OMG, it is a Jesuit conspiracy!):

Because of the precedent Obama and Brennan have set, such decisions are going to continue to be made by one or two persons in a room as they see fit…These two men, that is, have taken a definitive, and probably irreversible, step in transforming the American President into an Emperor. But, of course, as long as he has a priest by his side, that’ll be OK.

Obama set the soul-wounding precedent that Trump is following. Now, the Trump administration is showing Americans their snuff videos of boats being blown up, hoping, as Klay worries, that some of its base will “imbibe the madness.” And some do, though it seems far from a net political benefit. Then, the Obama administration hid their kill shots from Americans, and its base was quite content not to see them, while blithely accepting their deadly result.

In other words, the Obamacan base was being fed not nasty snuff images but a constant stream of supercilious horseshit, and was, by that, “morally shaped” to “give the president his freedom of action…that we will still have to reckon with.” And if members of that base don’t recognize, renounce, and account for what their hero did, and what they did by cosseting that hero in their minds while limiting themselves to statements showing how culturally and morally superior they are to those in the other “base” who haven’t read Augustine and Aquinas, then they are just sad, sanctimonious, and politically debilitating hypocrites.

It's become the dominant, easy strategy of liberal commentators to pick loud, rhetorically crude reactionary targets to demonize, while explicitly or implicitly embracing the pernicious but rhetorically sophisticated liberal imperialists, who end up committing crimes both those liberal commentators and the reactionaries they disdain support.

The only thing different about the Trump administration is its crude, blatant, boasting about its imperialist violence. The Obama administration, like all U.S. imperialist administrations, was the same pig, with better lipstick, and deserves no less contempt for covering its porcine violence with deceitful moral pretensions. You will have no political credibility if you don’t acknowledge this.

Phil Klay, who I can’t say is naive, but who joined the Marine Corps in 2005, “because I thought military service would be an honorable profession,” and thinks that the Trump administration is only now “turn[ing] a noble vocation into mere thuggery” should maybe have relied less on the Christian theologians than the nation’s most-decorated marine, Smedley Butler, who knew over 90 years ago that being a marine meant being “a gangster for capitalism.”  Thinking on all that with my Jesuit training, I gotta wonder if there has been an order that more clearly called for Augustinian disobedience than the order to deploy to Iraq. Isn’t deployment the first order—in relation now to Venezuela, Iran, or Palestine—that we must call on all military personnel to disobey?

Klay is of the school that thinks Trump is “tarnishing” the uniform and “wounding the soul” of the nation by his proud broadcasting of the images of imperialist violence. I’m of the school that thinks it’s a good thing that arrogant crimes and the imperialist soul of the nation are shown to the world in all their naked glory. I think seeing that is more likely to encourage soldiers to refuse orders and the public to support that refusal. This is the beneficial Trump effect I wrote about here:

Trump is diminishing the aura of the presidency, and generally gumming up the works. As Rob Urie puts it: “The most public political tension now playing out is between those who prefer the veil of ‘system’ against the venal vulgarity of that system’s product now visible for all to see. What Mr. Trump’s political opponents appear to be demanding is a better veil.” Not I. The lipstick is off the "presidency" and the whole political beast it sits atop of. Good. Let's have no nostalgia for a time when a smooth operator was picking your pocket with a smile while you were transfixed by his mellifluous patter.

It’s not about Trump or Obama or St. Augustine. It’s about the imperatives of capitalism, imperialism, and Zionism that drive American policy. The last thing we need is theologized, morally anguished commentary that obscures those fundamental forces. The first thing we need is to drop our illusions and figure out how to fight and defeat those forces persistently attacking the citizens of the U.S. and the world from many directions and both American political parties.

Crimes of the boat-attack type have been a standard part of bipartisan American imperialism (that’s the category, not from St. Augustine) for as long as we have lived (You don’t have to go back to Smedley Butler. Has everyone forgotten Vietnam?). Until and unless oh-so-well-educated, philosophically astute Americans renounce their previous favored imperialist heroes who committed those crimes, they should not be surprised when their carefully targeted professions of moral disappointment and superiority will be widely perceived, with reason, as sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Really, please, get how much, and how many, people are put off by this. It doesn’t work!

So, let’s assume everyone’s good-faith desire to do something more than virtue signal by parsing the Constitution and/or the Church Fathers to show how much smarter and nicer one is than Donald Trump. I invite Phil Klay and the six Democratic “seditionists” who boldly and correctly denounce the Trump administration’s aggressions, to join me in explicitly calling for every American military officer or soldier to disobey any order to attack civilian boats, or to participate in any attack or invasion of Venezuela, and to accept, without reservation, whatever wounds to the soul, ego, ships, planes, or personnel of the armed forces of the United States that will necessarily inflict. While we’re at it, let’s also encourage disobedience to any order to participate in the insulting, colonialist, Trumpian ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza/Palestine or in any military action in support of Zionist colonialism.

Let’s all put ourselves on the line with the soldiers we are asking to—saying they must—disobey orders and disrupt the whole of the U.S. imperialist mission in Venezuela and Latin America (and, for good measure, the Middle East) with at least scores, preferably hundreds and thousands, of military resisters. That’s what will gum up the works which Trump, the current captain of the imperialist ship, along with a bipartisan congressional crew, is cooking up in the name of our nation, and that’s exactly what we must want to see, and help make, happen. Let’s, in other words, do what the logic of your purported ethical, constitutionalist position demands: encourage mutiny.

And, with all my Jesuit training, I don’t give a shit what St. Augustine calls it.

______________________________

Alien Agenda?

Alien Agenda?

Disclosure politics lands on the White House lawn

Jim Kavanagh

      

Yeah, I’m going there.

Here’s a little something from out of left field that I now think is worth putting on everyone’s radar: There is a lot percolating in UFO world, and, for the first time, there’s a real possibility it is going to spill into the political world in a way that cannot be ignored.

I’ve been a UFO buff since I was a kid. I’m talking Donald Keyhoe, Betty and Barney Hill, et. al. I’ve followed the subject closely and consistently. I am convinced that: 1) There are real UFOs/UAPs/USOs of non-human intelligence (NHI), and 2) The US government has NHI craft and bodies, and has had ongoing programs retrieving and attempting to back-engineer craft, at least since the 40s, including programs of disinformation and fakery. Ditto Russia, China, and maybe other governments.

The OG of UFO

Now, you may think I’m nuts. Which is OK.  I'm not interested in convincing anyone. It’s a subject that is filled with disinformation and fakery and deserves the utmost skepticism.  One needs to spend a lot of time to sort it out. I also think, when one does sort it out, there is so much evidence that it is only denied because of severe threats against disclosure, combined with rigorous siloing, epistemological anathema, and consistent ridicule, which works very well.

It’s also easily hidden and considered something not worth thinking about, because it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Indeed, even though the USG reversed decades of absolute denial and acknowledged the existence of UAP/USO of unknown, and possibly extraterrestrial, origin eight years ago, that news—which many thought would freak everyone out, or at least provoke some sharp public interest—has been absorbed and forgotten as if it were a weather report. So, though the phenomenon obviously has spectacular implications, it has had no discernible significant effect on society or people's lives, politically or economically. I’m a Marxist, and this phenomenon has had no effect on the class struggles on earth we must focus on. (Though,Yes, Virginia, there is a corpus of Marxist Ufology.)  

Even the technological advances some claim were gleaned from studying NHI craft since the 1940s—fiber optics, night vision, semiconductors, etc.—were not all that impossible within normal human science, and have not had earth-shattering effect. We’re still waiting for a good flying car. You’d think, if exponentially advanced energy and propulsion systems have been zipping around for 80 years, that would have radically upended life as we know it—or at least appeared as a super weapon to win a war. And it hasn’t. So, whether the phenomenon is real or not, it’s been irrelevant.

That may be about to change.

First of all, the phenomenon is getting more brazen. The mass wave of “drone” sightings last year over towns, beaches, and military facilities in the Northeast (and not just the NE, and not just New Jersey) was impossible to hide, or to explain. It’s clear “drones” are the new “swamp gas.” But that flap still had no dangerous effects that couldn’t be ignored. This year, the phenomenon impinged on political/military events in a way that was dangerous. The wave of "drone" sightings over European airports and military installations was likely related to the phenomenon, and it was blamed, and used to suggest an attack, on Russia. That's a kind of provocative appearance in a crisis situation that does threaten to destabilize the world.

Second, in unprecedented ways, the political and media establishments are taking the phenomenon seriously. A ripple started with the NY Times story in 2017, when the paper of record recognized the seriousness of the phenomenon and the credibility of the pilots witnessing it. It was a story that cancelled the automatic ridicule toward discussing the phenomenon. The ripple has become a flood since David Grusch came out in 2023 and testified before Congress, convincing a bipartisan group of legislators—from Rubio to Schumer to Gillibrand—of the reality of NHI craft and “biologics,” and prompting them to attempt to pass strong whistleblower and disclosure legislation on the subject. They could not, because the resistance of whatever deep-deep state element controls this was still too strong.  Two years later, there have been more congressional hearings with more credible witnesses.  There are now hundreds of people in the know—military, intelligence, scientific, and political—opening up about this in greater detail, in podcasts and in closed-door congressional meetings. If you’re on any media, you can’t escape it.

The new documentary film, Age of Disclosure, is now the leading edge of this tide of revelations. It features 34 former and current scientists and senior government, military, and intelligence officials who claim to have direct knowledge of NHI and of an 80-year craft recovery and reverse engineering program—people like Jay Stratton, former director of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, who says: “I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings.” It also claims that President George H. W. Bush knew of NHI who landed at Holloman Air Force Base in 1964, and that Presidents George W. and Donald Trump (in his first term), considered, but decided against, revealing the truth about the phenomenon.

Now, again, you may think this is all a load of bullshit, but this film, and the narrative it represents, is being taken seriously by mainstream politicians and media. At this point, there is just too much of the story out there, in too much detail, and I think there is a non-zero chance that something more is going to give, in a dramatic way. A “disclosure” is happening and being believed, and what the politicians and military/intelligence figures involved in this fear most now is what they call “Catastrophic Disclosure”—a reveal that is not managed properly enough to avoid upsetting the fundamental structures of political and economic power.

Of course, it would also provide the ultimate distraction from the crises of late capitalism and fading hegemony. The preferred spin would be to use the UAP phenomenon to gin up a New Cold War arms race—We have to figure out how to fully weaponize NHI tech before the Chinese or Russians do. ‘Cause they’re working on it, too, and may already be ahead.

Or maybe Werner Von Braun’s alleged prediction that the USG will use a false-flag alien invasion to demand the weaponization of space—a prediction recently reprised by Jeremy Corbell. Whatever gets the defense contractors fed. 

Fictional or real, there’s a UAP disclosure story waiting to be used to exacerbate “New Cold War” international tension and militarism—which is especially sad if it’s real.

So, there is now a push—based on the intense interest of administration insiders like Rubio and the fear of Catastrophic Disclosure—for Trump to announce that, Yes, we are not alone in the universe. The US has NHI craft and bodies and programs for investigating them. The pitch to him is that it would be the most important presidential speech ever, and would cement his legacy as the most important president ever. And if he doesn’t do it, Putin or Xi might. Why leave them the opportunity? ‘Cause the story is coming out, one way or another. Historical, cosmological narcissism. A pretty irresistible pitch for Donald Trump.

To be sure, this is an ultimate Black Swan warning—there is only the slightest chance of it happening and enormous, unknown consequences if it does. I say only a “non-zero” chance because, even after the NYT and David Grusch, until right now, I would have put the chance at 0—either because, if you wish, there’s nothing to disclose, or because the resistance will continue to be, as it has been, absolute for reasons we’ll never know.

One of four things will be the case:

1.      The phenomenon is not real, and there will be no “disclosure” about it.

2.       The phenomenon is not real, and there will be a fictional “disclosure” about it, as a device for manipulating the population.

3.      The phenomenon is real, and it will continue to be denied, to serve the purposes it always has.

4.      The phenomenon is real, and there will be “disclosure” about it, which you can be sure will be manipulatively limited and fictional in its own way, for its own purposes. 

I still think 3 is the most likely scenario, and five years from now, we’ll be having the same discussion. This is the most closely guarded secret. But, for the first time, 4 is possible. I put the chances at about 10%. Let’s keep the possibility in mind, and not be blindsided by it should it occur.

 If the phenomenon is real, disclosing even a bit of it will be fantastic enough to capture people’s attention, but there’s a danger that people will then demand disclosure beyond the obvious, and I’ll just say, after thinking I knew about this for decades, I’ve recently come to think it’s much weirder than we’re prepared for—an alterity,  an “other,” that we cannot have imagined. There are more things in heaven and earth… 

We live in interesting times. Live long and prosper.

____________________________

Trump-Mamdani Bromance

Trump-Mamdani Bromance

Opposites Attract

Jim Kavanagh

The Trump-Mamdani meeting in the Oval Office blew everyone’s mind. Without renouncing the “communist” and “fascist” epithets they’ve thrown at each other—indeed, with Trump good-naturedly accepting his—they had a very friendly exchange.

Islamophobic, anti-communist rightists like Laura Loomer found it “Wild to allow a jihadist communist to stand behind the President’s desk in the Oval Office."  Indeed, it drove Laura to drink—ginger ale, that is: “I had to drink a bottle of ginger ale today after seeing Mamdani in the Oval Office because it physically nauseates me seeing Islamic jihadists infiltrate our government.”

And it didn’t quite go as the rightists expected:

The Israelis also found it confusing:

Of the jihadist communist, Trump said “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job…And we're gonna be helping him, to make everybody's dream come true, having a strong and very safe New York."

Despite Zohran’s sticking to his “fascist” and “genocide” guns, leftists  found his cozying up to the fascist genocidaire billionaire hard to swallow (even with ginger ale), and found most apt Trump’s remark that "I will say there's no difference in party. There's no difference in anything.” Political theater of the capitalist and imperialist duopoly.

Centrists found it a “vision” of new political possibility::

Though somebody has to explain to me how this works. Are the young well-to-do guy and the old billionaire both on the “bottom”? Where’s the “top”? Is Trump engaging in a class-warfare solidarity fest or another kind of buddy hug? We’ll come to that.

Mamdani Musings

Mamdani Musings

Jim Kavanagh

So, New York City, the most Zionist city in the world outside of Israel and the capital of capital, has elected a new Muslim immigrant mayor who is a professed anti-Zionist and socialist. How cool is that?! Let's consider.

First of all, yes, the role that Mamdani has played as part of the surprising, unprecedented, and quick, sea change in Americans’ attitudes towards Israel and Zionism—the normalization of not just “criticism of Israel” but explicit anti-Zionism within American political discourse—is important. As I’ve argued previously, there is nothing more important.  And, yes, Mamdani’s campaign has been a key reflection and driver of that change. It's indisputable that his “I'm not going to visit Israel” moment was a turning point in his campaign, and therefore an inflection point in the national political discourse.

At that moment, it became clear in New York that Mamdani was winning because he refused the Zionist loyalty test, and it became clear to the entire country that Zionist loyalty was becoming a political detriment that would be increasingly difficult to hide or overcome.  Anti-Zionists now say, “If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere,” while, astonished and infuriated, and after spending at least $22 million, the Zionists have to lament, “If we can’t make it there, we’re in trouble everywhere.”

Whatever ultimately comes of it, this victory of anti-Zionism is, in itself, an unprecedented and good advance in the ideological and political framework of the country, a positive         moment, a good political thing. And, have no doubt: It is the thing that Mamdani’s opponents are most upset about.

Let’s also recognize that, for the purpose of defeating Zionism in the world, Mamdani’s victory will have little to no practical effect. For one thing, it’s a local election. Because it’s New York, it’s of national ideological and political significance, but he’s still only the mayor of one city. Beyond the beneficial ideological effect of his victory, Zohran Mamdani can’t do much to change U.S. policy towards Israel and Zionism. He can institute BDS-type policies—divesting from Israel bonds, revoking contracts and partnerships with the Israeli government, municipalities, and companies, etc.—and most boldly, as he suggested, arresting Netanyahu if he sets foot in the city.

For another thing, Mamdani’s “anti-Zionism” is a little evanescent. There’s no reason to deny his career-long statements about Palestine: “It is Palestine that brought me into organizing, and it is Palestine that I will always organize for,” or his undeniably courageous refusal to endorse Israel as a “Jewish state,” which logically makes him (though I’m not sure he’s ever explicitly called himself) ”anti-Zionist.”

At the same time, there is no reason, either, to refrain from asking how his anti-Zionism relates to the entirely unforced Zionist-friendly decisions he is making.

It seems starkly contradictory, for example, to keep as police commissioner the uber-Zionist, uber-wealthy, oligarch heiress, Jessica Tisch.

This is the top cop who denounced as “antisemites,” and led the NYPD attack against, pro-Palestine, anti-genocide Columbia student protestors, and who “promised” the ADL that “the NYPD will …remain on the front lines of this fight” to treat anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

This is the police commissioner who sent her senior NYPD staff to a training session which “cast the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety…, focused heavily on student protesters, repeatedly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism…categorized campus demonstrators as extremists tied to Hamas, and branded as antisemitic Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘all eyes on Rafah.’”

This is a police commissioner who has the NYPD engaged in continuous joint training and intelligence-sharing with Israeli law enforcement and military forces, including the International Liaison Program, which maintains a NYPD detective post in Israel.

Israel: the 51^st state and 79^th precinct.

Sure, Zoran might say that, as mayor of New York City, he couldn't be expected to exclude everyone with Zionist thoughts from his administration. But the police commissioner is not a trivial administrative post; it’s one that deeply affects how pro-Palestinian politics can be expressed in the city. And Jessica Tisch is no casual, unthinking Zionist–by-default, but a committed, militant Zionist.

There are a thousand nasty battles over his professed anti-Zionism that are to come, with the NYPD and the federal government. To take the very difficult one, on which he has ostensibly staked out a determined anti-Zionist position: Will Zohran Mamdani be counting on Jessica Tisch to—almost certainly in defiance of federal authority—arrest Benjamin Netanyahu? Or has his “anti-Zionism” surrendered that battle in advance? One may like to keep an open mind about how that challenge will be resolved by Mamdani, but it seems to me it already has been.

Perhaps even more telling, because it cannot be excused by the exigencies of, nor will its effects be limited to, New York City—is Zohran’s decision to oppose a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries. It’s not even that Jeffries’s likely opponent, Chi Ossé, has such a strong anti-Zionist position; it’s that Jeffries has been so sycophantic to Israel that he’s been nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur,” and everyone understands he represents the worst of sold-out Democratic Zionism. Whether Mamdani wants to support Ossé or not, trying to prevent him from challenging Jeffries reads as a gratuitous defense of the rightly despised decrepit Democratic Party apparatus, including its intransigent Zionism, which Mamdani’s campaign was all about disrupting.

We cannot help but notice, as Steve Salaita puts it, that such decisions have “a detrimental effect on anti-Zionist consciousness.  Instead of inspiring (or reinforcing) a stronger stance against Israel, the campaign… [is] once again defending the appeasement of Zionists as a necessary condition of political success.”

The second radical leg of Mamdani’s signature political project is his professed “socialism.”

Again, it’s a good thing that Mamdani helped to normalize the idea of socialism, which has been growing among people whose lives are being increasingly constricted by capitalism. His campaign has demonstrated that some version of "socialist" discourse and policy, presented forthrightly, wins.

Of course, you don’t have to be a Marxist theoretician to understand that Mamdani’s (the DSA’s, AOC’s and Bernie’s) concept of “democratic socialism” is the mildest version of social-democratic reform, and that his proposed “municipal socialist” policies—rent freezes, free buses, childcare, public groceries— represent no radical threat, and nothing particularly new, to New York or American capitalism. (I urge everyone to see one of Mamdani’s best campaign videos, an homage to Vito Marcantonio, an Italian-American who represented NYC’s East Harlem in Congress for seven terms as a lifelong socialist, in a historical context where there was a real socialist movement.)

In today’s capitalist America, any attempt by a politician like Mamdani to re-introduce a concept of basic “sociality,” of concern for the general welfare of the people and society—let alone the vigorous socialist politics that once had purchase in American local and national politics—is furiously portrayed and attacked as an attempt to turn the country into “North Korea, with a dash of Sharia.” (I kid you not. I can’t make this shit up.)

As the capitalists and Mamdani know, there’s no such thing as socialism in one city. The mild, socially aware reforms Mamdani may be able to achieve would be of concrete help to a lot of people, and are worthy of support, but they will be contained within the limits of New York City and national capitalism. Only if the Mamdani victory became a building block of a national movement not just to reform, but to consciously confront and overturn the dictatorship of capital, would it be a threat.

As the man himself said:

Mamdani’s increasingly uncritical implication in the Democratic Party is reflected in his legacy-Democrat transition team, whose most radical member, Lina Khan, has progressives all aflutter. That, combined with his defense of Democratic leadership in the person of Jeffries, smells more of ambitious Democrat team spirit than revolutionary socialist fervor.

As the capitalist dictators understand quite well:

https://x.com/FiorellaIsabelM/status/1986089972940652702?s=20

Let’s, please, not forget that we’ve seen the emergence of “socialism” before—not long ago by any but American memory standards, and in a context where it was taken much more seriously by even mainstream pundits.

When I started posting political commentary online, I chose the above February 2009 cover of Newsweek, when the financial crisis made everyone, on a national level, recognize the failures of capitalism and the need for state intervention and for managing social wealth in a different way—you know, more for the benefit of the whole of society than the 1%.

Propelled by immense popular and political support (more than Trump just came in with), Barack Obama walked through the door that had opened to socialism and promptly shut it in the face of the working class, promising the banksters that he would stand as "the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And he, indeed, helped transfer mass amounts of wealth to them, while evicting homeowners and demolishing small (especially black) businesses.

I continue to use that icon because I don't want people to forget what happened, when something else was possible.

Because of the legacy of Obama's failure to change things fundamentally, as he could have, a failure that the Democratic Party refuses to recognize, and continued to embrace through Biden, more millions of people ever year—especially working-class and non-white people (read those links and weep)—were driven to the false hope of “anti-establishment” Trump and the “anti-government” Republicans.

Mamdani needs to remember the first video that marked him as a possible winner—the one where he listened respectfully to non-white, working-class New Yorkers who voted for Trump. It was Obama and the Democratic Party that made that happen. Any professed “socialist” or “progressive” politician or movement that does not recognize, and say, and persuade people that they understand that—and I suspect Mamdani, now settling into the AOC-Bernie-progressive Dem nest, will not—is going to end up doing it again.

Zohran Mandani, even if he professes (as Obama did not) to want to open a door to socialism, will find it virtually impossible to find that door today in the fortified capital of Capital, especially if he’s dragged down by the dead weight of the “We’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is” party he’s clinging to.

Mandani is not the radical jihadist or the revolutionary socialist of the fevered tabloid dreams. He’s another Obamacan reformist. Whether he’s more sincere and less of a con man, we shall see.  His professed commitments to the most unradical, basic social ethic at home and anti-colonial ethic internationally turned the reactionary capitalist-Zionist American ruling class of New York City and America apoplectic. They know very well, however, that his ability to realize any but the most minimal of his stated goals will be constrained by their class power and by Zohran’s self-confinement within the Democratic Party wing of the political apparatus that their class provides.

Sure, wait and see. I’m an old-school native New Yorker, and I “know the score by now.” Without promoting him or expecting anything more from him than AOC 1.5, I voted for Mamdani—for the pleasure of watching Shmuley's and Rappaport's heads explode, if nothing else. I hope he gets, and think he might, a couple of the moderate reforms he’s proposing, and maybe, relative to his poor predecessor and with the help of such as Soros, he’ll succeed as mayor and be wound up for higher office.  I will not be surprised, however, if, as Obama's pitchfork management paved the way for Trump, Mamdani’s paves the way for the next Giuliani or Bloomberg.

Whatever Zohran Mamdani does in New York, and wherever he goes from here, the system needs a revolutionary change nationally that's not going to come from him.

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The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

 The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

Jim Kavanagh

Am I missing something or is there much less concern than one might expect in the country over the fact that the government is shut down?

I understand that each of the protagonists—the Trump administration and the Democrats—knows its own fundamental weakness in this situation and hopes it can turn the other’s weakness to its advantage, if played carefully enough. But I repeat: the government is shut down, for over a month now, with no end in sight. Thousands of people are getting laid off, thousands of businesses and millions of people aren't being paid or receiving services, scores of programs and agencies are being suspended or eliminated. Forty-two million people are about to lose their SNAP benefits, and millions will see their health insurance premiums soar. Flights are being cancelled as air traffic controllers are laid off. The country should be up in arms. Why isn’t it? Why the big—actually, moderate—yawn?

Well, maybe because paralysis is the normal state of affairs for the U.S. government. The budgetary process is now comprised of an infinite chain of Continuing Resolutions, Supplementary Appropriations, and Debt Ceiling fights. There is no agreed-upon concept of what the federal government is or what it should be doing.  Though our entire social economy depends on and is structured by it, there is no understanding of why this is so or how it works. People perceive “the government” as some kind of strange animal they have to live with that sometimes brings food and favors, sometimes goes wild and attacks the neighbors or the siblings, and spends a lot of time busying itself with tasks that no one understands. And, of course, an animal that lives off the food (taxes) it eats from our hands. Or something like that. It’s more than that people don’t have a dog in the fight; it’s that they don’t know what the dog in it is.

This is a nice example, a political instance, of what Marxism calls alienation —the phenomenon where social subjects become estranged from the process and products of their own labor, which they confront as strange, alien entities and forces with which they have little, and largely antagonistic, relation. This occurs because the process and product of their labor is not under their control. In this case, the political process of producing a government and the government produced by it, though nominally an expression of the people’s will expressed through elections, are not actually under the people’s control.

It's under the control of the same ruling class, which appropriates the political power that flows from people’s hands and uses it for the ruling class’s own antagonistic interests, in the same way that the ruling class takes the economic wealth the people’s labor created and turns it against them.

The ruling class wants the people alienated from the “government” and confused about what it is. The ruling class does not want the polity to have clear lines of political authority that derive from the people, that the people can understand and, heaven forfend, exercise.