The Stupid Evil Revolution
Godwin's Law is not mocked
As I’ve stated before on this publication, I do believe we live in Revolutionary times.
By which I simply mean that the United States of America is undergoing a profound transformation of our institutions of government and our political alignments. Some obvious ways this happening now:
The Constitutional system of checks and balances is no longer in effect and the Executive branch has been unleashed by an ineffective/complicit Congress and a Supreme Court that has granted the Executive criminal immunity. We are essentially a one-party dictatorship now, as the Republican party is under Trump’s thumb and letting him run the show.
The Federal bureacracy has been gutted, with a reduction in force, elimination of programs, and the departure of a significant number of competent, independent civil servants as the Executive branch attempts to establish a Federal workforce consisting of regime loyalists. At the same time, unprecedented amounts of resources are shunted into an inhumane immigration enforcement project that is really ethnic cleansing and farming for the prison industry in disguise. The New Deal/Great Society bureaucracy and the gains of the civil rights era, both anathema to the MAGA project, have been smashed.
We have abrogated long-standing global alliances as we adjust from the postwar order that featured a West vs. East system into a new multipolar order which includes additional rising powers. We have also completely turned our backs on the “international rules-based order” and accepted the “might makes right” principle of power. Not that the U.N. rules were ever that strictly adhered to, just that we aren’t even pretending any more.
I say “we” but not everyone in the United States supports this version of the Revolution. An alternate version, in which we balance out the tax structure by forcing the wealthy to pay a greater share, and institute stronger labor organizations and more social welfare programs, has been expressed by the Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic party.
But the Democratic Socialists are not the party’s leaders. The leaders continue to complain about process and seem intent on somehow restoring the status quo ante of the years before 2016.
This cannot be done.
For me, the harshest pill to swallow is knowing that the quality of the current revolutionary leadership is so atrociously poor. This happened because the right wing populist movement that took over used a political outsider to leverage the popular perception that the establishment is entrenched and corrupt, but then picked one who is also corrupt and entrenched in a criminal network1, and is pathological to boot.
So now we’re ruled by basically a supervillain, whose criminal enterprise is managed by sycophantic subordinates selected not for experience and competence, but for personal loyalty to their boss. We ended up with the worst possible form of government.
So we have the spectacle of cabinet meetings that are nothing but spineless groveling before the Dear Leader. Grown men wearing shoes they don’t want for fear of offending their boss. That they are oversized shoes just emphasizes how out of their league these officials are.
And then They Started a War
Of course they did.
It’s the American way.
From what I can tell, Trump decidered to make war on Iran after being pushed by Israel and Saudi Arabia, Iran’s two big enemies in the region. Trump probably thought, stupidly, that he would replicate his success in Venezuela - a quick regime decapitation, followed by bullying a compliant new Iranian leader to his advantage.
As Substacker Mike Alexander points out, that was not going to happen, since the Middle East is not Latin America. We set ourselves up for another protracted “Forever War” like the Iraq War. Exactly what Trump promised he wouldn’t do, but whatever, he is full of shit, as most of us have figured out.
Even discounting the idiocracy effect, there is a kind of inexorable logic that led us to this war, like it was bound to happen sooner or later, and Trump’s Presidency was simply a fortuitous circumstance that ushered in this inevitability. We’ve had military bases and forces in theater ever since we started building up our capability with the establishment of USCENTCOM in the 1980s, with strategic goals of ensuring that the oil flows and that terrorism is contained.
Journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that his military sources tell him that attacking Iran was too easy an opportunity to pass up. Never mind that diplomacy was probably the better option for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, presumably the primary objective here. There was just this tremendous institutional pressure from a military machine that was poised to strike, and then along came a President with an itchy trigger finger2.
That President blundered into a war, and now we have the spectacle of the leader of the United States begging former allies, now estranged and wary, to come and rescue the country from a quagmire of its own making.
War Crimes of the Mafia State
Aside from the embarassment of the strategic blunder, there is also the shame of the conduct of U.S. forces.
Even before the Iran War started, we’ve had Operation Southern Spear committing murder on the high seas. Even if we accept the argument that drug runners are enemy combatants, acts such as killing the survivors of a shipwreck violate U.S. military law and international law.
Another egregious act was the sinking of an Iranian ship in that was returning from an exhibition hosted by India. As Arnaud Bertrand points out in this Substack note:
Probably the most abject part here is that the warship had many survivors - 32 to be precise (apnews.com/article/sri-…) - and the U.S. made zero effort to rescue them, despite it being required by the laws of naval warfare and simply being the honorable thing to do.
It took little Sri-Lanka, with its very modest means - especially compared to the $1 trillion US defense budget - to do the honorable thing and launch a (successful) rescue operation.
Even the literal Nazis, during WW2, rescued the survivors of ships their U-boats sank. It was considered a matter of basic honor.
Yes, that’s right. We’re worse than the Nazis now.
The comparison was bound to come up, given the nature of our leader, who rose to power much like a certain other leader did, and is similarly fighting a war while disconnected from the reality of it, surrounded by lickspittles who are afraid to tell him the truth.
The parody meme writes itself. In fact, it’s already been made:
It disturbs me to know that our military is willing to obey some of these orders that for all intents and purposes seem beyond what is acceptable or honorable in war.
The State rots from the head down, I suppose. This is what you get when you put stupid and evil in charge.
Leaving aside the question if any act of war could be considered honorable, and not a crime, military leaders are obviously obligated to conduct themselves professionally. The recent U.S. bombing of a school, killing scores of young girls, could be considered an unfortunate accident, though I’ve yet to read about an apology. And I must admit that when I first heard of it, I thought the bombing may well have been deliberate.
It’s not hard to believe that a war machine controlled by the Epstein class would be willing to do such a thing.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof urges us to consider what U.S. conduct looks like from the other side: Does Trump Risk Turning America Into a Rogue State? Kristoff is careful with his language, but he gets to an important point: we used to try to make war less deadly for civilians3, if it was too much to ask to prevent it altogether. But the current Pentagon leadership has scrapped that idea.
That is to the detriment of the collective future of all humanity.
As explained here: Kendzior, Sarah. Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. United States: Flatiron Books, 2020 (ISBN 9781250245397). You can follow the author on Substack.
This proclivity for using military force for its own sake is reminiscent of the saying, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It also reminds me of this scene from the classic movie His Girl Friday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA3wJRuClks&t=69s
This would be in response to the horrors of the Second World War, for which only the losing side was punished. Philosopher A.C. Grayling has made a compelling argument that the aerial war by the Allies against civilians in Germany and Japan, including the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should be considered war crimes. See: Grayling, A. C.. Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. United States: Walker Publishing Company, 2007 (ISBN 9780802715654).