By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost
I just read a most remarkable piece in The Seattle Times—remarkable for its bluntly nihilistic candor. The headline atop Ron Judd’s August 2021 essay for The Times’s Pacific NW Magazine gives a good idea of the writer’s point: “The decline of American civilization.” And the subhead: “There’s more bad TV than ever; it’s available everywhere; and it’s making us fat, lazy, selfish and stupid.”
News sometimes seems to travel slowly in these parts, but never mind that. If Judd’s observations were pithy three years ago, they have the gravitational pull of Jupiter as we read them today. Here is Judd bringing home his thesis:
Based on our current state of national dysfunction, cultural warfare and garden-variety public psychosis—more on this after a few commercial messages urging you to ask your doctor about a new wonder drug, Byxfliptaz—it’s undeniable that the mainstream American today possesses all the crisp, mental faculties of a Jell–O salad left too long out in the sun at an August picnic at Marymoor Park.
Now does not seem the time for bad TV or brains gone to Jell–O. In consequence of a rapid succession of events, none appearing related to any other, the collapse of America’s seven and some decades of hegemony is dramatically accelerating. Some astute observers now think the “international rules-based order,” as the policy cliques call the projection of American power, is already done for. I suppose the choice lies between accepting this reality and watching bad TV, and O.K., the latter proves tempting to a surprising many.
Awake, O sleepers, and arise from the dead!
On the eastern flank of the Atlantic world the imperium’s managers have lost a war they were confident they would win when they started it with the coup they arranged in Kiev a decade ago. The West’s wild miscalculation in Ukraine leaves Russia the victor, and it would be hard to overstate the consequences of this blow for American power and prestige.
Added to this, the policy cliques’ years-long effort to isolate Russia, cripple its economy and destroy the value of its currency has manifestly failed. As measured by the growth rate of gross domestic product, the Russian economy is handily outperforming America’s and Europe’s. With ruble-denominated trade increasing at a startling pace, the currency is stable. Moscow is now a leading force as the non–West, a.k.a. the Global South, coalesces behind a multipolar order based on legally binding principles of sovereignty, the U.N. Charter and other multilateral documents and declarations.
Some readers may have taken little notice, but the new leaders in Niger, who came to power in a coup against the nation’s pro–Western president last July, have just 86’ed the U.S. military, which has long maintained a $250 million outpost in northeastern Niger that the Pentagon considers essential to Washington’s effort to project power across West Africa and the Sahel. So much for the “full-spectrum dominance” of the neoconservatives’ turn-of-the-century dreams.
Saving the worst for last, the United Nations Human Rights Council just received a 25–page report and a 12–minute video summary from its special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” You can read all the blurry New York Times apologias you want about the Gaza crisis. It remains that in the eyes of the world’s majority, the U.S. is sponsoring a mad-dogs regime as it exterminates an entire people. The price the imperium will pay for this in years to come will be steep.
Turn off the tube and think about these developments. To take them together, as we should, they tell us two things. One, a new world order composed of multiple poles of power, however strenuously Washington seeks to undermine it, is breaking out all over and gains momentum as we speak. Two, Washington’s policy cliques, stupidly unwilling to accept 21st century realities, are likely to act with increasing desperation as U.S. primacy finally gives way to a global order worthy of the term. If you thought the past couple of decades have been violent, chaotic and destructive, brace yourself: There is almost certainly worse to come.
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However long the Biden regime goes on saying the war in Ukraine is “at a stalemate,” and however faithfully our corporate media repeat this nonsense like ventriloquists’ dummies, if the Kyiv regime is losing ground daily and there is no realistic hope of regaining it, the word we are looking for is “lost.” The question it is time to ask: What will the U.S. and its European vassals do when the make-believe wears out and defeat, while never admitted on paper, is too obvious to deny?
Nothing good. As a negotiated peace on any terms acceptable to Moscow is out of the question, and as subverting “Putin’s Russia” remains the objective, the U.S. is likely to intensify the sorts of covert ops and “hybrid warfare” that have been on Washington’s menu for decades. This stands to get very dangerous very fast. Did we have a preview of messes to come with the shocking attack on the concert auditorium and shopping arcade near Moscow on Mar. 22? This is my read.
The U.S. “intelligence community” was quick to make public an “assessment”—a flimsy term that commits no one to anything—that the attack was the work of a group of militant Islamists and there was no evidence Ukraine had anything to do with it. Soon enough an offshoot of the Islamic State, ISIS–Khorasan, claimed responsibility. President Putin, who had been cautious from the start about assigning blame, eventually declared that Islamic terrorists were indeed culpable for the deaths of 137 innocent Russians and for setting the Crocus City Hall ablaze.
Identifying ISIS–K as responsible is a complicated business, we must bear in mind. After the collapse of Washington’s client regime in Kabul three years ago, many members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, finding themselves suddenly homeless, joined ISIS–K as shelter from the storm. These were CIA–trained intelligence and counterinsurgency operatives, and they reportedly went over in considerable numbers. There were subsequent reports, never verified, suggesting that the CIA was using unmarked helicopters to supply ISIS–K with weapons and matériel. A year ago last week, Foreign Policy described it as “arguably the most brutal terrorist group in Afghanistan.”
Moscow, perfectly aware of these connections, now concludes that the CIA, along with Britain’s MI6, were behind the Crocus Town Hall attack, with the Kyiv intelligence agency, the SBU, playing a supporting role on the ground. The chief of Russian intelligence unpacked all this last week as he outlined Moscow’s findings. “We think the act was prepared by the radical Islamists, but, of course, the Western special services have aided,” Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB’s chief, asserted. “And the special services of Ukraine have a direct hand in this.”
There is too much circumstantial evidence supporting this case to dismiss it. The CIA’s “assessment” assigning responsibility to ISIS can be taken as perfectly true but only half the story. The same day Bortnikov spoke, Russia sent a hypersonic missile—the kind that eludes standard air defense systems—to destroy the SBU’s headquarters building in Kyiv. This is what I mean by things getting very dangerous very fast.
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It is hard to say what Washington will do now that Niger has declared that the 1,000 U.S. troops stationed there are “illegal” and ordered them removed. It is easier to say what the U.S. will not do, unfortunately. It has given no indication whatsoever that it has any intention of withdrawing its troops and shutting their base.
A spokesman for the new government in Niamey, elaborating on the official statement on Mar. 17, asserted the U.S. presence “violates all the constitutional and democratic rules, which would require the sovereign people—notably through its elected officials—to be consulted on the installation of a foreign army on its territory.”
That may sound like boilerplate, but it is exceedingly important Niamey cast its expulsion order in such terms. Addressing the Nigerien statement at a press conference, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, brushed it off as if it were dandruff on his lapels. Let us watch as the master of the international rules-based order now demonstrates—just as it did in the Iraq case a few years ago—that the rules and the order have nothing to do with respect for the sovereignty of other nations or the democratic principles the U.S. wears gaudily on its sleeve.
It is unlikely Niamey will be able to force the U.S. out, just as Baghdad couldn’t when it ordered all remaining U.S. troops out a few years ago. Do you think the rest of the world is watching bad TV and will take no notice as American soldiers stay on in the Nigerien desert? The extent the U.S. succeeds in defying another host nation’s order will be the extent of another loss of credibility, prestige, and respect.
You’re seeing a few commentators these days who are looking at these various developments—the lost war in Ukraine, the West’s failure to isolate Russia, mounting hostilities to the U.S. in West Africa, the ineluctable rise of a new world order—and taking them together as a measure of the imperium’s accelerating collapse.
The American Conservative published a piece last week headlined, “The ‘Rules–Based Order’ Is Already Over.” If Dominick Sansone overstates his case, which focuses on the West’s confrontation with Russia, it is not by much. “Moscow has insulated itself from Western ostracization, thus changing the entire balance of power in not only Europe, but the world,” he writes. “The ‘rules-based’ economic and political order has been irreversibly altered.”
In another piece that appeared last week, Moon of Alabama, the widely read German website, argued that the defeat in Ukraine announces the end of “military hard power superiority” as the West’s most effective “instrument of deterrence.” It must now find “a new tool that allows it to press its interest against the will of other powers.”
And then, turning to the Gaza crisis, this disturbing conclusion:
It found that tool in demonstrating utter savagery.
The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide. That it will do everything to prevent international organizations to intervene against this.
That it is willing to eliminate everyone and everything that resists it.
To me the Moon of Alabama piece is chilling precisely to the extent what it has to say is plausible. We are now invited to consider whether the West supports the Israelis’ barbarities in Gaza because barbarity is now policy. I cannot dismiss this argument.
“Those nations who commit themselves to multipolarity,” the piece concludes, “should steel themselves for what might be visited on them.” The comfort to be taken here, cold as it may be, is that the non–West knows all about bracing itself against the imperium and the former colonial powers. And the Russians have shown them these past few years that it can be done.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
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