The Last Regime Change and the Left’s

Lateness in Opposing Biden’s Wars

BY ARTURO DESIMONE

 MAY 9, 2024

FacebookTwitterRedditEmailPhotograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Around the world over the past six months, many ordinary and horrified spectators of the Gaza catastrophe have been left wondering why the US acts as if handicapped in its efforts to rein in its client state Israel, even as North America’s international standing dwindles abroad, while Biden loses popularity at home and elections loom. Onlookers were left stymied and confused by the US president’s dismissal of swing-state Michigan’s “Abandon Biden” movement, as Arab-American voters fiercely hit back against what Dearborn MI mayor Abdullah Hammoud called Biden’s authoritarianism, hemorrhaging the president in his party’s primaries—just as the campaign had vocally promised to do should Biden continue on his path of docility in the face of Netanyahu’s violations of the laws of war while receiving unprecedented American aid. Biden’s displays of weakness before the Israeli leadership’s defiant ingratitude towards its American benefactor has alarmed conspiracy theorists, who point to Biden’s pusillanimity, and to Blinken’s genuflections as proof of the antisemitic belief that Israel, despite being the US’s dependent client-state and privileged subject, actually directs US policy as a whole. It is no surprise that such ideas would at once confirm both the median antisemite’s delirium along with Netanyahu’s, whose megalomania once famously inspired Bill Clinton to muse, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is—who’s the superpower around here?” after the two leaders met in 1996. Megalomania is also a trait that characterized Netanyahu’s role-model Ariel Sharon. Such hubris is what makes many Netanyahu supporters indifferent to a very real danger to Israel and to the diaspora: the American leadership’s feigned impotence whenever the world clamors for Washington to rein in Israel, leaves a misleading impression on vast audiences: an indelible memory that will undoubtedly fuel future antisemitism, by projecting the illusion that Israel rules the US, rather than the other way around.

 The view from inside Israel, even today, is the inverse: center-right newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth featured a cartoon that would have gotten its illustrator fired had it appeared in the Western press, showing a dwarfish Netanyahu arm-wrestle a towering Biden, with the PM’s fist like a baby’s wrapped around the senile giant’s finger. In the same paper, columnist Nahum Barnea wrote “Netanyahu has been dealing with America the way a spoiled teenager deals with his parents: perpetual rebellion, perpetual insults and perpetual scandals.”

 Biden’s flaccid condemnation of Netanyahu is not only “weak”, but also performative: from judging massacres as “over the top” in the comedic language of SNL, to reportedly calling Netanyahu “an asshole” privately, as Blinken came back from self-humiliating junket-visits to the Middle East. American claims of a “rules-based order” are no longer taken seriously even by the usual lapdogs among Europe’s elites like Josep Borrell.

Nobody has thus far pointed out the possibility that the US administration supported the Gaza campaign over the past grueling months because it saw this war as its last chance to doggedly push through at least one successful overseas regime-change, before the end of both Biden’s uninspiring presidential term and the natural termination of the old man’s life cycle, of which he and his staffers increasingly wary.

Biden officials’ callousness toward civilian suffering is nothing new. Consider recent years of thwarted American overseas interventionism. For pundits, the prospects of rallying modern Ukrainian Cossack regiments to topple the Russian juggernaut was, after all, perfectly worth the deaths of more than half a million young Ukrainian men, and many more un-conscripted civilians. The US and EU happily exploited Ukrainian poverty and naiveté—the Ukrainians’ deleterious thirst to belong to an idealized, imaginary “West” was taken advantage of by the real West, along with Ukrainians’ very un-Western and un-contemporary cultural belief in the need to forge national identity in the flames of collective sacrifice and unconventional warfare. The result: 600.000 dead Ukrainians and the unceasing fragmentation of the country.

Famine for Afghanistan presented no dilemmas for Biden, so long as sanctions promised a slap on the bearded faces of the triumphant jihadists after NATO lost that maimed country. The scarcity of medicine in Iran’s previously impressive healthcare system, a result of Biden’s renewal of Trump’s maximum pressure policies, has not stirred consciences in the White House. Whether you call Gaza a massacre, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or hellscape, for Biden the uprooting of an official enemy by way of a proxy client-state is simply an example, a point to be made, an American perception-management op.

Past US presidents resorted to more artful and elegant theatrics. JFK earned jealous admiration through Marilyn Monroe. Reagan even stood accused of having impersonated senility to get through the hearings over Iran-Contra. Let’s not forget George W. Bush’s performances of imbecile generative grammar. “They misunderestimated me” indeed: the circus of “Bushism” was what made a Trump presidency possible.

Biden drags farce to new lows, in terms of the quality of his acting-skills, transparently dishonest when bleating about a “ceasefire by Monday!” over ice-cream to throw off Michigan’s “uncommitted” activists during primaries. Ben Shreckinger’s biography “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty Year Rise to Power” chronicles a Biden who acts as sociopathic and opportunistically as Netanyahu or Trump. There is no reason doubt that, until it became a pre-election optics-crisis, Biden had adamantly signed onto Netanyahu’s, Gallant’s and Smotrich’s plans to level the Gaza Strip. The only major international ideal Biden has shown dedication to is regime-change by any available means. Yet it remains a goal that has continuously eluded him, because of the problematic factor of populations standing in the way. Thus far, Western coup attempts backfire by strengthening the stranglehold that autocratic governments under siege have over their civilian populace. This boomerang effect was proven in Syria and in Venezuela, where ruling bodies and their popular support bases grew in tenacity, despite or because of “maximum pressure”. Obama, under whom Biden was VP, attempted to rehabilitate the art of overthrow-by-bombardment as a progressive (rather than Bushite) cri de guerre. Yet the only coup-d’état technique that thus far seems to work, is the sort that was discredited by global moral outrage towards Plan Condor in 1970s Latin America. More recently, that playbook was implemented by Pakistan’s military against deposed Imran Khan, in a country that nobody from the West cares about or pays attention to.

US officials have learned by now that when dictators in the Muslim world are executed, this opens up a vacuum that is quickly filled by radicalized jihadi elements in populations, as happened after the Biden-approved Iraq invasion. Biden could not fend off the Taliban and was instead reminded of lessons forgotten by the West during the Cold War: lessons about the resilience of native guerrilla insurgent units. The wrong lessons: MSNBC Democrats hoped for a “new Afghanistan” that would entrap Russia in Ukraine. Now that the Ukraine war also seems unwinnable, Biden wants to leave office having at least uprooted wretched little Hamas, even if that means uprooting all Gaza Palestinians along with their governing entity. Civilian death rarely factors as relevant in Biden’s foreign policy calculations and is offset by the need to show that the empire’s not dead yet and that America can still pull off one impressive coup or “humanitarian intervention”. But these efforts, too, have failed: the world was not dazzled or awestruck for a moment by the American-Israeli response to October 7th as it was by the charismatic Zelensky’s fight against Russia. Both the Ukraine crusade and American endowment of Israel have failed at their intended mythmaking objective of rejuvenating America’s global image: the US seems weaker, more irrational, unfree and outdated, rather than potent, despite or because of its fanatical support for Kiev and West-Jerusalem. One would be tempted to joke that this is Biden’s “Homer Simpson moment” for exclaiming “Doh”, were the consequences not so bloody.

Much of the world rejoiced at seeing America struggle with the Houthis’ idealistic pirate-state. This series of frustrated regime-change attempts culminates in the inability to uproot Hamas’ pauperized government from tiny Gaza, even after Israel displaced Gaza’s entire civilian population, unable to find the antlion lair of the Hamas commanders, after purporting these to be located beneath Al-Shifa hospital.

The violence, because of scale, is seldom recognized from afar as yet another proxy-war and regime-change-op. Of course, that’s not what Netanyahu would like it to be—the Likud leader, ever since the death of Sharon has sought to fill the shoes of father-figure to the settler-movement, promising to avenge fundamentalists evacuated from Gush Katif in 2005 by emptying Gaza of all Palestinians in 2024 while the anemic US president still sleepwalks.

But for the Biden White House, all the Israeli invasion amounted to, before it came to embarrass Western elites, was a last chance to celebrate one successful and memorable deposition of an official enemy government, (Hamas, to be replaced with Abbas’ Palestinian Authority) civilian lives be damned as they were in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine.

By now, not even Linda Thomas-Greenfield could seriously argue that things are looking good for American exceptionalism. The hero-cult surrounding khaki-clad warrior-fundraiser Zelensky—an aura of heroism which is also rapidly fading from our fragile, TikTok-fraught memory—helped us quickly forget the disgraceful images of Western fugue from Afghanistan. But with the current war, disgrace is back full-circle, the heroism passé. The endeavor at “shock and awe” to win hearts and minds abroad, has ultimately given way to a morbid burlesque of self-emasculation of US foreign policy in the 21^st century: a defeat which may inspire the West’s enemies for decades. There is also the clear danger that all the speculations and misunderstandings about Biden’s true intentions behind overindulging Zelensky and Netanyahu will fuel antisemitic conspiracy theorists long after Biden shuffles off this mortal coil.

But political instinct is also lacking among imperialism’s critics. In response to the “mystery” of Biden’s capitulations to Netanyahu’s tantrums, an array of commentators associated with the left, from the New Left Review’s Wolfgang Streeck to fellow traveler Geoffrey Sachs to pro-Palestinian online commentators all struggle to explain Biden’s willingness to take a nose-dive in domestic polls and risk electoral defeat for the sake of pleasuring Netanyahu.

Streeck, Mearsheimer and Sachs are only the most sincere and eloquent among these critics, who treat a vulgar and relatively obvious situation as if it were rife with opacity and sinister riddles.

The thesis that Israel controls US-Middle East foreign policy, advanced by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book “The Israel Lobby” was discredited by none other than Norman Finkelstein, who insisted that while Israeli advocacy groups do impact Washington’s foreign policy towards Israel, they are not what determines American military operations throughout the wider Middle East or in Iraq. Finkelstein ridiculed Walt-Mearsheimer’s suggestion that Cheney would be submissive or at the mercy of an ideological commitment to Zionism, or, for that matter, to anything other than Cheney and a 500% boom in Haliburton stock. But because the enemies of both Mearsheimer and Finkelstein tend to be the same people, Finkelstein’s critique was neglected by untrusting liberals who lump him and Mearsheimer together.

Enter Wolfgang Streeck. In his column “Master and Servant” for the New Left Review’s blog Sidecar, the German political scientist proclaims that the US has become the unwitting, pathetic hostage of the Israeli nuclear behemoth it fed: “Has the US lost control over its protégé, servant turned into master, master into servant? (…) Is the US, blackmailed by the threat of a Middle Eastern Armageddon, now forced to allow Israel to pursue ‘victory’ at any price? Does Israel’s capacity for nuclear war bestow on the Israeli radical right a sense of invincibility, as well as a confidence that they can dictate the terms of peace with or without the Americans, and certainly without the Palestinians? The political costs incurred by the US for not ending the killing – either not wanting or not being able to do so – are likely to be gigantic, both morally, although there may not be much to lose in that regard, and strategically: the ‘indispensable nation’ paraded before the world, helpless in the face of brazen disobedience on the part of its closest international ally.”

Streeck identifies the Israeli mentality as the “Samson doctrine”: “In fact, there is an even more ancient model of Israeli heroism, the myth of Samson, which seems to be no less popular among at least some of the nuclear strategists in and around the IDF command. Samson was a ruler of Israel – a ‘judge’ – in biblical times, during the war between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 13th or 12th century BCE. Like Heracles, Samson was endowed with superhuman physical strength, enabling him to kill an entire army of Philistines, reportedly one thousand strong, by striking them dead with the jawbone of a donkey. After being betrayed and falling into the hands of the enemy, he was kept prisoner in the main temple of the Philistines. When he could no longer hope to escape, he used his remaining strength to pull down the two mighty columns that supported the roof of the building. All the Philistines died, together with him. (…) Nuclear weapons are sometimes claimed by radical pro-Israeli commentators to have given the country a ‘Samson option’ – to ensure that if Israel has to go down, its enemies will go down with it. (…)Myths can be a source of power; a credible threat of extended suicide can open a lot of strategic space –“

It is an interesting juxtaposition: Samson, the Jewish Hercules, has cowed Biden, the whimpering opportunist, into submission, the mewling old emperor taken hostage.

Instead of reaching for the Torah’s powerful myths of ancient guerrilla resistance, or for TikTok for that matter, why not apply scientific method, and seek the simplest explanation?

Biden’s sluggishness in responding to pressure is not mere senility. Nor can it be entirely chalked up to former US diplomat Chas Freeman’s explanation, which is that Biden’s generation of politicians still embrace Leon Uris’ “Exodus” epic account of Israel (an aesthetic Democrats also clearly borrowed for the propaganda promoting the Ukraine war, which cast Zelensky as a 21^st century Moshe Dayan.) The simplest explanation is two-fold. Biden’s White House, firstly, grew accustomed to harmonious compliance and sycophantic consensus within his party throughout the wars waged during the years preceding October 2023. Second: more than any other Democrat alive, Biden boasts a stronger record of unabashedly declaring himself for sale to all pressure groups who milk politicians, ever since his youthful sleazy entry into Delaware politics. Data from the NGO Open Secrets highlights Biden’s having received more than double the donations from AIPAC and similar Israel-linked groups than the next tier of top recipients on that committee’s list. Compare Biden’s $5,736,701 in donations from pro-Israeli pressure groups to New Jersey’s Michael Menendez ($2,500,005) or Hillary Clinton ($2,361,812) Such lobbyists are of course doing nothing foreign to the auction-house logic of Washington, and Biden has from the start of his presidency upheld the priorities of militarist neoconservative donors.

Much like the farcical “aid” to Gaza, Biden’s foreign policy has sought to reverse damage he himself inflicts upon American “Exceptionalism’s” image abroad. These ill-conceived efforts mounted ever since his now-forgotten inaugural scandal—the shambolic US-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, which disheartened Western elites, but was glorified by sectors of the left as a milestone defeat of imperialism even as Biden seized that famished country’s assets. A genuine defeat of imperial arrogance in Afghanistan would have been a democratic plebiscite in which the Afghans were, for once, consulted on what Afghans actually want—Western protection from the Taliban, or immediate withdrawal and compensation for all the years of ruination? What about Western prosthetic medical technology to aid the maimed country’s abnormally high percentage of amputees? Afghanistan had no winners except for defense contractors, regardless their race or religion.

Trillions of dollars and four years later, Biden finds himself exactly where he started: omening the decadence for the Western foreign policy establishment, without a single coup that stuck. Just many experiments, all very expensive fuckups, though more affordable than the traditional military onslaught that didn’t “outsource” to foreign legionnaires. American and European progressives who waited three years before criticizing Biden’s wars and his crackdowns on anti-war voices, are all to blame for the boneyards in Gaza and the Donbass today. We must not forgive ourselves or anyone else. Where were we all this time?

Arturo Desimone (Aruba, 1984) is an Aruban-Argentine writer, poet and visual artist. His articles on politics previously appeared in  CounterPunch, DemocraciaAbierta, Berfrois UK, Diem25news and elsewhere. Author of the poetry collection Mare Nostrum/Costa Nostra (Hesterglock 2019) and the bilingual book “La Amada de Túnez” which  appeared in Argentina during the pandemic, he has performed at international poetry festivals in Granada, Nicaragua, Buenos Aires and Havana.

The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus

by Edward Curtin / May 2nd, 2024

photo by Jeanne Lemlin

To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly.  It was a common form of execution in the ancient world.  It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians.  In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the weak by the strong, such as the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by the Israel government.

Twenty or so years ago when the wearing of crosses by all types of people was the cultural rage, a woman I know said she was thinking of getting one.  When I asked her why, since she was Jewish, she said it was because she thought they were beautiful.  She seemed oblivious to the fact that to Christians they were gruesome but revelatory spiritual symbols, the equivalent of the electric chair or a noose, but linked to the Easter Resurrection and the non-violent triumph over death that is at the core of Christianity.

Her focus on beauty forcibly struck me that secular culture had triumphed in its establishment of an anti-creed creed wherein the pursuit of a sense of well-being and aesthetic tranquility had trumped traditional belief, while it used all faiths in its pursuit of a self-centered nihilism through a faux-spirituality linked to a precious aesthetic of beauty.

Philip Rieff noticed this in the mid-1960s when he wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

To raise the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses – except the sense of the past – as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. . . . this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out of one cage into another.

While today those cages would better be described as cells – as in cell phones – Rieff’s point was prescient in the extreme, echoing in its way Max Weber’s 1905 prophecy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of the coming “iron cage.”

It would be understandable if you assumed the photograph of the crucifix that precedes my words was taken in a church since its foregrounding before the apse of the Medieval Spanish church of San Martin at Fuentidueña makes it seem so.  It was not, except if you realize that museums have become the modern churches, where people flock to revere art for art’s sake and perhaps to find some consolation they have lost at a deeper level.

Museums that have been built and maintained by the very rich to serve as their own churches to the glory of mammon and their own self-deluded immortalization.

Mammon that has been built on the backs of the poor and working class, just as these edifices have.

Beneath all high cultural institutions such as museums and arts venues like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center in New York, etc., lies the expropriated labor and land of the lower classes, the same classes whose sweat and blood was exploited throughout capital’s historical transmutations from commercial to industrial to financial to create the immense wealth of the super-rich.

There is a reason the nineteenth-century America industrialists such as Vanderbilt, Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al. were called “The Robber Barons.”  They were crooks.  They are still with us, of course, aided and abetted by today’s latest billionaire class.  They build and finance the aforementioned cultural institutions as well as own and operate the major institutions of mass communication and entertainment, such as newspapers, television networks, telecommunication corporations, film studios, etc. – the entertainment industrial complex.  In this direct communication capacity, they control the mediation of “reality” to the general population.  They serve the interests of what the great crusading sociologist C. Wright Mills called the power elite in and out of government, of which they are an interlocking part, and through which they move smoothly in a game of revolving chairs.  They operate the great Spectacle for the general population while moving the levers of power backstage.

When he died, Mills was working on a massive book exploring what he provisionally titled The Cultural Apparatus.  He defined this complex as follows:

The cultural apparatus is composed of all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on and of the means by which such work is made available . . . it contains an elaborate set of institutions: of schools and theaters, newspapers and census bureaus,  studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines and radio networks. . . Inside this network, standing between men and events, the images, meanings, and slogans that define the worlds in which [we] live are organized and compared, maintained and revised, lost and cherished, hidden, debunked, celebrated.  Taken as a whole the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they report and interpret what they see.

Columbia University, where he taught and is today in the news headlines for its police crackdown on student dissent for their pro-Palestinian protest, is one of those elite cultural institutions, a place Mills was never comfortable at and whose colleagues looked at him askance for his critique of the power elite’s warfare state.

Columbia, with its racist history as it saw its elite status threatened by the growth of the neighboring black community in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and Columbia’s further expansion into these neighborhoods since.

Columbia, like all elite cultural institutions, born in its own mind sui generis and raised to the heights in purity and innocence, but whose foundation is rotten with dirty money.

Yet, as Terry Eagleton recently wrote in the London Review of Books, “This is not the way culture generally likes to see itself. Like the Oedipal child, it tends to disavow its lowly parentage and fantasise that it sprang from its own loins, self-generating and self-fashioning.”  Like Columbia and all the elite universities of “higher learning” –  Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. – that serve as legitimating tools for the power elite and their mendaciousness, the museums and other well-known arts institutions exert an enormous influence, not only over culture in the high cultural sense, but over the transformation of society as a whole, often in ways that go unnoticed.  Eagleton again:

There’s an irony here, since few things bind art so closely to its material context as its claim to stand free of that context. This is because the work of art as autonomous and self-determining, an idea born sometime in the late 18th century, is the model of a version of the human subject that has been rapidly gaining ground in actual life. Men and women are now seen as authors of themselves . . .

The photo of the crucifix and the apse that precedes my words was recently taken in The Cloisters in upper Manhattan, New York City, where the ghosts of dead religious beliefs prowl about the rooms.  It is meant to present a “chapel-like gallery.”  The Cloisters is a museum owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is now known as The Met Cloisters.  It, and the beautiful 67 acre Fort Tryon Park upon which it sits, was created and financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who, according to The Met’s website was fascinated with the past.  “The expert artistry of medieval art as well as its innate spirituality strongly appealed to this philanthropist and collector,” we are told.

Spirituality from the Middle Ages, I will amend, that when it had been transported to the museum was devoid of its living context and could be presented as a gift from a Robber Baron family to the people of NYC who needed to be uplifted by the noblesse oblige kindness of the Rockefellers.  Dead spirits devoid of living inner religiousness who smuggle secret messages to a public hungry for meaning.

Like my friend who considered getting a cross, Rockefeller no doubt found the crucifix and apse that frames it quite beautiful and spiritually uplifting, but not the living spirituality of the criminal Jesus whose message about wealth never informed the Rockefellers’ ruthless exploitation of others on their rise to power.

In years long past, when I first visited The Cloisters, being a native Bronx New Yorker, it was known simply as The Cloisters, even though The Met owned it since its inception in the 1930s.  Before I visited it as a young man, I had the impression it had some religious significance, as the name cloister suggests (early 13c., cloystre, “a monastery or convent, a place of religious retirement or seclusion”).

But I was wrong; it is a museum, a beautiful museum build with stones from European monasteries, churches, and convents transported long ago across the Atlantic and reconstructed on the heights above the Hudson River.  It is filled with medieval art collected by Rockefeller, George Gray Barnard, and other wealthy art collectors.  For those so disposed to wondering what royalty prayed for in medieval days – was it to slaughter as many Muslims as possible in the Crusades? – one can view the tiny prayer book once owned by the Queen of France – and imagine.  Such imagining might cause one to realize how little things have changed and how little things mean a lot.  The trick is to notice them.

Political power needs cultural power to operate effectively.  The elites can’t just slam people around and expect no response.  They need to worm their ideological messages into the public consciousness in pleasing ways.  Writing of Edmund Burke, Eagleton says, “Instead, he recognises that culture in the anthropological sense is the place where power has to bed itself down if it is to be effective. If the political doesn’t find a home in the cultural, its sovereignty won’t take hold.”

Thus, for an example from Hollywood and the pop-cultural realm, we might notice how many movies and TV shows were secretly co-written by the Pentagon.

Another name for this is propaganda

Cultural messaging is where the power elite need to seduce regular people that power is being exercised for their own good and everyone is in bed together.  Soft power.  Nice power.  Power that is disguised as beneficial for all.  Beautiful power.  “Spiritual” power.

As I said, Fort Tryon Park (designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted) and The Cloisters are spectacularly beautiful.  Walking through the park on a sunny spring day to reach the museum on its northern end – the flowers and cherry blossom trees dazzling and the Hudson River glistening below – one is overwhelmed by the beauty and grateful to its human gift giver – John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  It takes a little mental stretching to grasp the paradox or the delusional dream of such thankfulness.  But it cuts to the heart of the power of the cultural complex and the ways it works to soften the ruthlessness of its ultra-rich capitalistic controllers.

First they rob you, then they gift you with a walk in the park.

And when you step inside their institutions, you are provided with opportunities to think within controlled parameters, while also getting a whiff of the theatrical nature of your experience.  The whiff is as important as the thinking, for it is a reminder to keep your mouth shut and you too will flourish.  The fraudulence of the cultural entertainment-educational complex can dawn on some who have been invited into the inner sanctums of power and prestige, as it has done presently for many college students (and some faculty) whose consciences do not allow them to sit still while Palestinians are slaughtered.  But if you dare to act upon your sense of being taken for a ride, watch out!   You will be banned from the pleasures that are offered for your acquiescence, as these students are now finding out.

They have rejected that part of the learning experience that George Orwell called Crimestop:

. . . [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.  It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Sometimes real thinking and conscience win the day, for the power of the elite’s cultural institutions is not omnipotent.  Everyone is not for sale, even those invited into the banquet.  Teach people to think and meditate on history and they just might think outside the cage of your expectations.

While the genocide of the Palestinians is transparent for everyone to see, the leaders of these elite universities, unlike the rebellious students, turn a blind eye to the obvious.  They follow the script they were handed when they accepted their prestigious positions of power, living up to Julian Benda’s famous appellation – The Treason of the Intellectuals.

But “beautiful” power becomes the iron fist when the plebes get too uppity and actually take seriously their studies and rebel as human beings with consciences.  This is the flip side to the hidden messages of the elite cultural institutions.

This two-sided process of hidden and obvious messages operates also in the media complex (see this).   While the so-called liberal and conservative media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Palestine, Israel, Russia and Ukraine, etc. that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media and from people they consider dissidents.  They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.  Few notice them, for they are often imperceptible.  But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them.  This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful  or not.  It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly-schooled people.

Some people think that if you see more than is apparent when visiting sites such as The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, you are incapable of enjoying the beauty of these “gifts.”  This is not true.  They are not mutually exclusive.  The great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois coined a term double-consciousness which I think can be used in this context to describe some people’s experience, not just that of African-Americans.  They see at least two truths simultaneously.  Their unreconciled double-consciousness prevents them from single vision when visiting the power elite’s beautiful creations.  William Blake’s words – “May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep! – inform their perspective.

On the same trip to The Cloisters, my wife and I walked extensively through Central Park, surely one of the most beautiful parks in the world.  It was spectacularly aflame with Cherry Blossom trees and people from all over the world enjoying its pleasures, as did we. I, however, when entering and exiting this paradise, couldn’t help thinking that this park was caged in by the massive apartment complexes of the super-rich elite class, as if to say to the park’s visitors: you can visit but not stay.  We oversee your pleasures.

Max Weber said it well a century ago:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”Facebook

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Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

The School of Ancient Greece for Science,

 Civilization, and Planetary Governance

BY EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS

MAY 4, 2024
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Alexander the Great attacking the Persian King Darius in the Battle of Issus, Nov. 5, 333 BCE. Pompeii mosaic. Naples National Archaeological Museum. Public Domain

Prologue

Alexander the Great accomplished so much so soon so young that he rightly earned the honor of heroic greatness. He was definitely a hero and a genius. His mother Olympias tried to convince him he was the son of Zeus. Alexander loved and trusted his mother. He probably assured himself he was the son of Zeus. His hero, Achilles, was the son of goddess Thetis.

But the young man loved Aristotle who tutored him in Greek history, politics, philosophy, and international affairs. In addition, Aristotle passed on to his pupil his enormous knowledge and respect for Homer, the teacher of the Greeks for millennia. He edited the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer for Alexander. He urged him to unite the Greeks and to eliminate the Persian danger. Alexander did both. He was inspired by Aristotle. The result was unprecedented in history. His general Ptolemaios / Ptolemy, who was also a student of Aristotle, became king of Egypt and materialized the dream of Aristotle. He built a Mouseion-university and the Library of Alexandria. He opened the doors of these great institutions to the best Greek minds. The enlightenment that emerged in Alexandria was astonishing. It made our world. Alexandria became the capital polis of civilization for several centuries in the Mediterranean. And that really was the legacy of Homer, Aristotle, and Alexander.

Alexander’s dream

The other dream of Alexander was to create a united ecumene, in effect a world society and government under the rule of reason and his hegemony. This interpretation of Alexander comes from a Greek living in the Roman Empire that had abolished Greek freedom, conquering Greece in 146 BCE and making it a province of Rome. Plutarch was that voice. He was a Greek philosopher, prolific writer, and a priest of Apollo. He lived from about the second half of the first century to the first twenty of so years of the second century of our times. He served Rome but remained Greek.

“Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers,” Plutarch said, “wrote and taught how to live in ideal cities but never translated their ideas into political reality. Alexander did. He conquered Asia, but his purpose was more than control and warfare. He dressed like the Asians did. He tried convincing his officers to marry Persian women. He married a princess from Afghanistan. He also established more than 70 Greek cities in Asia, all of them governed by justice and the rule of law, thus eliminating injustice in large regions of his empire. Plutarch argues correctly that the conquest of Alexander brought peace, justice, and civilization to Asia. It was by living as citizens of these cities that the bad and unacceptable were extinguished. The lives of the citizens improved by familiarity with better ways of living. Alexander succeeded in reforming the institutions of several nations. He certainly is a great philosopher…. Alexander believed that the gods sent him to unite the world and create one commonwealth of equality and justice and civilization.”^[1]

Alexander the Great, left, and Nike, goddess of victory, right, is crowning his victories. Gold stater, dated about 322 BCE. The gold stater came out of Sardes (Sardeis), key city of Lydia, which became a province of Persia. Alexander used Sardes for his mint. Courtesy Numismatic Museum, Athens.

Alexander was a revolutionary. In trying to reform his empire, adding, for instance, non-Greeks to Greek culture, he faced resistance from his Greek officers and the local elites in Asia. After all, for the first time in history a conqueror abandoned violence as a governing principle. Alexander wanted to convince the vast majority of the conquered people he was their friend. He joined Europe and Asia by marriages, similar clothing, and the equal administration of justice and by founding Greek cities all over Asia so Asians could see the difference.

After Alexander

Unfortunately, Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE. He was barely 33 years old. He and his successors ignored the rising power of Rome. This turned out to be a fatal error. Romans learned from the Greeks. But the wars among Alexander’s successors weakened them and gave the Romans a free hand in the West. They dismembered Macedonia and Greece and, by the end of the first century BCE, the main kingdoms of Alexander in Asia and Egypt were provinces of Rome. The Roman republic became Roman empire, a vast territory that included Alexander’s empire and Europe. Some of the Roman emperors were responsible leaders, but most of the remaining emperors were ruthless and corrupt. One of them, Constantine, dumped Greco-Roman religion and culture for a messianic and monotheistic religion, Christianity. Such a violent policy turned Greco-Roman civilization upside down. The Roman government and the church in the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, hired northern European barbarians to smash the Greek temples, burn libraries, and otherwise level the magnificent treasures the ancient Greeks had built. The great Alexandrian Library went up in flames in late fourth century. And in 415, Christian monks tore to pieces Hypatia, director of a philosophy school in Alexandria. Her crime was teaching Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy.

Hypatia, detail from School of Athens by Raphael, 1510. Hypatia, in white robes, is above philosopher Pythagoras, shown writing on a book, and, possibly, next to philosopher Parmenides. Common Domain

Egypt and Greece belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire after the fourth century had fallen to the hands of European barbarians. This political division exacerbated divisions within Christianity, which blossomed to a civilization Schism of 1054. The anathemas hurled by the Pope and the Patriarch and the Patriarch against the Pope, brought the crusades. These religious wars inflicted death and destruction in Christendom and against Islam. The fourth crusade of 1204, instead of going to Jerusalem to fight the Moslems, it turned its wrath against the Greeks. French, German, and Venetian troops captured Constantinople, thus inflicting a giant wound on the security of medieval Greece. The Western crusaders burned the libraries of Constantinople and behaved like barbarians. Their occupation of Constantinople lasted for 50 years, cementing a rising hatred between Christian East and Christian West. The crusaders also captured the rest of Medieval Greece, shredding the country with foreign oppression and culture.

Victorious religious warriors from Venice, France and Germany enter Constantinople in 1204. Painting by Eugene Delacroix, 1840. Public Domain

Mongol Turks took notice. They took advantage of the protracted Christian civil war. They kept attacking the Greeks. In 1453, they captured Medieval Greece, which also exposed the West to the Mongol Turkish menace.

Fall of Constantinople, May 29, 1453. Mural from the Cafe of G. Antikas, Skopelos. Picture is depicting the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos on a white horse ready for battle. Public Domain

Greece suffered enormously from the loss of its freedom. Its best scholars left the country for Italy. They were loaded with the surviving manuscripts of ancient Greece. These Greek books were translated into Latin and started the Renaissance and made our world. In 1821, the Greek Revolution brought into being an independent state. In 1828, the European powers, Russia, England, and France, appointed Ioannes Kapodistrias as the first President of Greece.

Hellas, a sacred country, and school for humanity

Ioannes Kapodistrias, detail of a portrait by Thomas Lawrence, 1818-1819. The portrait shows Kapodistrias while serving as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia. Public Domain

Kapodistrias, 1776-1831, was from the Greek island of Kerkyra in the Ionian Sea. He was educated in philosophy, law, and medicine at the University of Padua. He proved himself a genius in diplomacy. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was so impressed by Kapodistrias he made him Minister of Foreign Affairs. Kapodistrias served in that powerful post from 1816 to 1822. In 1822, he took a leave of absence and set up home in Geneva where he founded the Philomusse Society to raise funds for the Greek Revolution and expand the cause of European Philhellenism.

The rise to power of Kapodistrias disturbed the Chancellor of Austria Klemens von Metternich. He ordered Austrian diplomats and other senior officials to watch him. One of the senior military officers named Joseph Chervenka, interviewed people who knew Kapodistrias. Chervenka summarized the impressions of those who spoke to him about Kapodistrias. On February 13, 1816, he wrote a report and sent it to Metternich. Chervenka said to Metternich that Kapodistrias had quite an agenda for making modern Greece into Hellas. He said:

“Kapodistrias expected all European powers unanimously to agree in establishing an independent Hellas with inviolable borders. Hellas would be neutral, not allowing any foreign intervention or influence in the country. Her sole purpose would be to cultivate the sciences and enlightenment for the benefit of humanity. Hellas would send teachers, artists, and laws to all countries. The rulers of those countries would be educated in Hellas. And in concert with their Greek teachers, they would be able to rule their people with fairness and justice in the spirit of Hellenic civilization. The geographical position of Hellas between East and West would help her to maintain a balance of security and peace. Kapodistrias also insisted that humanity would declare Hellas a sacred country.”^[2] (emphasis mine)

There are differences in the visions of Alexander and Kapodistrias. These two Greeks dreamt about the power of Hellas in relation to the rest of the world. One of the two, Alexander, had the power of the greatest king and emperor. His word was law. He created the largest empire the world has ever seen. He tried and to some degree succeeded to Hellenize the world, or at least, he put the first stone for an edifice of reason and civilization in a planetary governance. His premature death, however, undermined his original idea for a better world.

Similar misfortune struck Kapodistrias. In 1828, he took over a tiny, impoverished state threatened by Turkey and barely tolerated by the “great” European powers: England, Russia, and France. England was hostile to the new state of Greece. It never wished to see an independent Greece. England occupied the Greek Ionian islands and had strategic ambitions for capturing Cyprus, then occupied by Turkey. Moreover, England kept in its national museum looted Parthenon treasures. England could barely stand the ambitious policies of Kapodistrias to create the foundations of an independent Greek state. Here was a well-educated Greek who had served as Russia’s chief diplomat. But even before Kapodistrias was appointed to be the foreign minister of Russia, he had created an independent and neutral Switzerland and had prevented the division of France after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

Kapodistrias Road in Geneva. Sign is thanking Kapodistrias: “Diplomat and politician, defender of the interests of Geneva and Switzerland at the Congress of Vienna [in 1815].” Wikipedia

Moreover, Kapodistrias was a patriot who did not tolerate influence by foreign powers. He established the Greek armed forces, schools, the statistical service, a bank and national currency, and a national service for taxation. This caused resistance among those Greeks that had large estates. But Kapodistrias favored the peasants and tried to eliminate the disparities in the countryside. He used his personal wealth for funding the government. The British watched and supported the Greek resistance to Kapodistrias. British government officials could not tolerate a free and independent Greece governed by such a talented politician. Kapodistrias was the best European diplomat of his age. In all likelihood, the British funded two Greeks from Mani, Peloponnesos, Constantine and George Mavromichalis, who assassinated Kapodistrias on September 27, 1831.

The model of Hellas

The efforts of Alexander the Great and the first President of modern Greece Ioannes Kapodistrias to employ Hellenic civilization for the good of humanity reflect the greatness of ancient Greece / Hellas. Greece had the good fortune of becoming the lighthouse of the world. For several centuries it gave birth to science and civilization of unprecedented beauty, reason, justice, and virtue. This good fortune came into being in the works of the epic poets Apollonios Rhodios, Homer and Hesiod; the tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; historians Herodotos and Thucydides, the comic poet Aristophanes; philosophers / scientists who probed the heavens to such detail, that one of them, Democritus in the fifth century BCE, discovered the Atomic Theory and another, Aristarchos of Samos, in the third century BCE, proposed the Heliocentric Theory of the universe. Euclid in late fourth century BCE and Archimedes in the third century BCE pretty much created mathematics. Archimedes also advanced mathematical physics and engineering. Still yet another scientist, Hipparchos, set the foundations of mathematical astronomy in the second century BCE in Rhodes. He also left his fingertips all over the Antikythera Mechanism, an immaculate geared bronze computer of genius, the progenitor of our computers.

Main fragments (A-G) of the Antikythera Mechanism. Imaged by: PTM (Polynomial Texture Mapping). Fragments seen from both sides. Fragment A incorporates 27 of the 30 surviving toothed gears. X-rays of the front of Fragment A show the Cosmos with Sun at its center. The back reveal an upper spiral of a 19-year Metonic calendar and a lower spiral of an 18-year Saros predictive dial. The Antikythera Mechanism predicts the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon. Courtesy Tom Malzbender and Hewlett Packard.

Add to this extraordinary galaxy of intelligence and foresight, Aristotle, tutor of Alexander the Great and inventor of the science of zoology in the fourth century BCE, and you have lasting science and civilization power.

The Greeks lived in poleis (city-states) all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, “like ants or frogs in the sea and around a pond,” according to Plato.^[3] To make polis living enjoyable and tolerable and to protect themselves from each other and enemies, the Greeks invented political theory, democracy, jury courts, and laws published on acres of stone and marble for all to see and read. They built magnificent temples in honoring their anthropomorphic gods. They sculpted bronze and marble statues of the gods and handsome nude heroes, athletes, and dressed or naked women.

Reproductions of statues. Aphrodite of Melos, left. Kore (young woman) from the Acropolis, and Aphrodite of Knidos (Phryne) by Praxiteles. Painting by Evi Sarantea.

Greeks also shared the virtues of individuality, courage, the rule of law and justice, often democracy, science, technology, beautiful architecture and arts and crafts, theater, Panhellenic games, and festivals like the Olympics. And despite their conflicts, they created an admirable science-based civilization that became Western civilization.

Without Hellas: Climate chaos

However, the United States, Europe, and several other countries of the world have neglected most of the virtues they inherited from the Greeks (democracy, equality, rule of law, science for the public good and the discovery of truth, and love of the natural world). The result is awful. They are poisoning and damaging the planet and its ecosystems. The worst result of such carelessness and hubris is climate change. It threatens civilization, humanity, and the planet. The main conclusion of the US Fifth National Climate Assessment, Nov. 14, 2024, warns:

“The global warming observed over the industrial era is unequivocally caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂)—the primary greenhouse gas produced by human activities—and other greenhouse gases continue to rise due to ongoing global emissions. Stopping global warming would require both reducing emissions of CO₂ to net zero and rapid and deep reductions in other greenhouse gases. Net-zero CO₂ emissions means that CO₂ emissions decline to zero.”

Edward Munch, The Scream, 1893. National Gallery of Norway. Prophetic icon of the plight of humanity from human abuse of nature, in this instance from rising planetary temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. Public Domain.

But the most startling and devastating conclusion of the Fifth National Climate Assessment is that the US is beyond the charts. Its obsession with petroleum and petroleum-powered machines (cars, trucks, busses, ships, yachts, airplanes, leaf blowers, military fleets of airplanes and navies) have made the country extremely vulnerable to private greed, and to the forces of nature. Ceaseless dumping in the atmosphere of unfathomable amounts of planet-warming gases are threatening the country with thermal death. “The things Americans value most are at risk,” says the Fifth National Climate Assessment. “More intense extreme events and long-term climate changes make it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families, reliable public services, a sustainable economy, thriving ecosystems and strong communities… The United States has warmed 68 percent faster than Earth as a whole over the past 50 years.”

Without Hellas: Triumph of nukes

In addition, the United States and a few other countries possess nuclear weapons, the ultimate means of extinction. The intentional or accidental explosion of a single nuclear bomb is certain to cause dramatic and planetary damage and death. Nuclear war is unthinkable. It will destroy humanity, civilization, and the planet. It’s necessary, therefore, to abolish these evil weapons and find an alternative to the dangerous system of state and international governance.

Could Hellas become a school for humanity?

Neither Alexander the Great nor President Kapodistrias could have foreseen the moral abyss of the modern world. The idea of Hellas is still relevant to forestall the resurrection of dark age, or to slow down its spread all over the planet. Kapodistrias knew his age of official slavery, European colonization of the tropics, and monarchies was destined to continue warfare as the only means of resolving conflicts and protecting the selfish interests of the landed oligarchy and governing classes. He thought that ancient Hellas in modern times could become the school for humanity. This thought was uppermost in his mind but did not have the opportunity to translate it into a formal proposal and policy. When he had enormous power, he hoped that Russia, England, and France would bless that idea by securing the territorial integrity and independence of resurrected Hellas. This country would do nothing else but cultivate the sciences for the enlightenment of humanity.

Kapodistrias’ proposal merits support and testing. Would a resurrected Hellas devoted to virtuous activities for the benefit of humanity make a difference? Could this Hellenic polis become the paradigm for for the future of humanity and the planet? I would answer both questions in the affirmative. If some ancient Greek books could trigger the Renaissance among the Arabs in the 8^th century and among the Europeans in the 15^th century, imagine what a country devoted to enlightenment and the public and environmental good could accomplish. The challenges are two. Convince the large powers of our time, the third decade of the 21^st century (the United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union), to embrace such a new idea and give it a try. This would demand the end of war in Ukraine. The fire of Greek knowledge created the world. It can do it again. The countries of the European Union, the United States, and Russia own their existence to Hellenic civilization.

Second, modern Greece must become Hellas, that is to say, return to its ancient virtues of polytheism, democracy, science, naked Olympics, and political independence guaranteed by the world’s great powers, which will declare the country to be sacred Hellas. The prophetic visions of Alexander the Great and Kapodistrias have enormous attraction and power. The new sacred Hellas can indeed become the school for the planet. With many of its temples restored and schools open for the cultivation of science and enlightenment for humanity, it has a real opportunity to guide humans back to the right path of living in peace and harmony with each other and our Mother Earth.

NOTES

1. Plutarch, On the Fortune of Alexander, Discourse 1, 5-8. ↑

2. Polychrones K. Enepekides, ed., Regas-Hypsilantes-Kapodistrias (Athens: Estia, 1965), 196 (in Greek). ↑

3. Plato, Phaedo 109b. ↑

Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of seven books, including the latest book, The Antikythera Mechanism.