A Hard Night's Day

A coffeebuyer speaks out

My coffeebuyers are restive.

Bob sent me these comments.

It reflects a lot of what I believe.

I admire the scope of it — and the honesty. Not to mention the accuracy, which is amazing considering that this was not written as an article or essay, but off the cuff, spontaneously.

When I asked Bob for permission to post this, he offered to rewrite it and edit it to fix typos and organize it better . But I was afraid that it might lose something in the process. Maybe, lose feeling?

I will comment on this later. But for now I would like to share .

Bob Speaks

It is so often so painful to try to pay attention to what people are saying about the conflicts in the world.

I can’t watch or read the mainstream Western media at all. Just reading the headlines is enough to make me physically ill. I lose many minutes each day so outraged by the blatant lies and the brutal consequences for the most vulnerable among us that I cannot function. It is so utterly egregious that I have a difficult time believing that it is real. Effectively, EVERYTHING I was taught as a child about humans and how things work was a total LIE. Everything!

I get that your view seems to be that we’ve got systems that cause our worst traits to be exaggerated while our better traits are inhibited, and I mostly agree. But how did we get to that point? These systems don’t arrive from outer space. WE build them. My whole effort over several decades of daily hard study has been to figure out how and why that has occurred. And I’m not talking just the past few years or decades or even centuries. I am talking about a steady increase (in dehumanization) since the development of agriculture.

We have consistently and almost without exception taken the WRONG path. It is nice to talk about our good qualities — and we are capable of “enlightened" behavior, certainly — but it is utterly pointless if there is some flaw in our nature that prevents us from making a society hat is imbued with these positive qualities instead of just another steal-rape-murder system.

When reading the “alt” media, what irritates me daily is how they can’t seem to see what’s right in front of their eyes. Partly this is because of strong biases that they have that apparently remain unexamined. What was it about the unexamined life? I’ve spent my entire “adult” life trying to live the examined life.

So Mercouris says today that Putin (Russia) is the only state claiming that Zelenskyy is illegitimate and the he, Merciouris, does not agree because everyone else in the world recognizes Zelenskyy as the legitimate leader of Ukraine.

That second bit is pure bullshit. Lots of countries have expressed, even if only informally, grave reservations about his legitimacy. If not for the pressure from the US, they would openly challenge it.

But more importantly, as far as I can tell, Putin has never said that Zelenskyy is illegitimate. What he has said is that a strict reading of the Ukraine constitution does not support Zelenskyy’s claim that he is legitimate: that there is no language that permits him to extend his term without holding an election, although martial law means that elections are not required to be held.

This is a lawyer’s reading of the Ukraine constitution, and it is typical lawyer-speak. It does not make the claim that he is illegitimate, it makes the claim that the Ukrainian constitution says that he is illegitimate. It is the difference — a key difference — between me saying “Bob is a jerk” and “Sam says that Bob is a jerk”. Of course, to most humans these two claims appear to be equivalent. I have never understood this, but then linguistic precision is my goal and clearly not the goal of virtually anyone else — with the consequent tragedy for all life on Earth.

Still more important is why Putin is saying this. He’s not running Ukraine, so he does not give a flying fuck if Zelenskyy is legit. That’s on the Ukrainians to decide. What he is IS saying is that IF the RF were to engage in negotiations with Ukraine and depend on Zelenskyy as the chief negotiator or approver of any agreement, then it would be possible for a future Ukrainian administration to decide that Zelenskyy was illegitimate and thus so was any agreement he signed.

Given their experience with Minsk I, Minsk II, Istanbul I, etc., this is a very reasonable concern. In short: If we accept you as legit, how can we be sure that your successor will not claim that you weren’t and abandon any agreement you made? The suggestion is that maybe they should make absolutely certain of his legitimacy and his right to make agreements that are binding on successive administrations before they make any more agreements.

Of course, this is political theater. The Russians know that the “law” is utterly useless when it comes to the US, the EU, or Ukraine. They break their own laws daily with no consequences for themselves. Trump is busy tossing not only the Bill of Rights but also the entire US Constitution out the window, and Americans are apparently OK with it. Can’t be arsed to protect themselves, I guess. Or are so far into dreamland that they believe this will go away if they just pretend that it’s not happening.

In Moon of Alabama b. was quoting Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia, about which the level of HOPIUM in the alt media has gone supernova. Oh, my God! Trump can tell the truth! He’s a new man. It’s a new world. Pay no attention to his vicious attacks on everyone not in the über-parasite class. He’s going to usher in a paradise on Earth.

I’m gonna puke.

Some examples:

Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism …

The “ancient conflicts” are not so ancient, and they were almost without exception caused by US interference. Left to their own devices — or, better yet, encouraged honesty to develop secure, enlightened societies — who knows what would have developed in West Asia?

But the US has spent my entire lifetime actively destroying secular governments in favor of religious extremists and crushing every effort at democracy while installing vicious and brutal dictators. Every indication is that West Asia after WWII was heading in the opposite direction.

So right off the bat, Trump establishes a delusional view of the history of West Asia. As for exporting terrorism, the US is the greatest exporter of terrorism in the history of the world, exceeding even the horrific British Empire. The CIA is the most powerful and best funded terrorist organization (and drug dealer) on the planet. No one else (not even the KGB) has ever come close!

So what the fuck is this garbage about West Asian states — pretending that they were sovereign and not US puppets — exporting terrorism? That is such a gross and self-serving lie that no one should consider anything that follows worth paying any attention to at all.

The Trump says:

No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities …

More utter bullshit, and yet the alt media are CHEERING! Look! He’s finally admitting it!

EXECPT HE IS NOT.

The “gleaming marvels” are in fact Western end-state capitalist “marvels” of fucking over not only everyone not in the parasite or comprador classes, but all life on Earth. These “gleaming marvels” are exactly what we should NOT be building. And they were built with slave labor and serve only the global parasite class, permitting them to live comfortably in their self-imposed delusion. It’s as if the rest of us don’t exist.

Some marvels. More like horrors. And they were built precisely by the “so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits” and their local satraps.

Then he talks about the so-called “nation building” engaged in by previous administrations (including his own, although he somehow fails to mention this).

MORE COMPLETE BULLSHIT. We’ve been hearing about this nation-building nonsense since at least the Bush II administration, if not earlier. It has never been true. The object of American interference in West Asia is to destroy nations and nationalism. Nationalism, not communism, has always been the #1 enemy of the US, because nationalism leads to self-determination and sovereignty and that means that the US is no longer in control.

The goal of every effort in West Asia since WWII has be to DESTABILIZE everything. “Stability” is only permitted under US puppet regimes — every one of them a tyranny — such as the Shah or the Saudi regime. Or Hussein when he was in the pocket of the CIA and brutalizing Iran. Or the current king of Jordan. Or the pathetic Lebanese government. And don’t get me started on “Israel”.

Even with the regimes it has created and controls, the US destabilizes them to keep them frightened and cowed.

I must have missed the nation building in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Somalis, Sudan, Ethiopia/Eritrea, etc., etc., etc. Please enlighten me if I did.

He (Trump) then says:

In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves …

Well, they didn’t build any nations at all, so I gather that “far more” is pretty accurate, but this still acts as if nation-building were the goal. It wasn’t. Ever. As for intervening in societies that they did not understand, they never had any interest whatsoever in understanding these “inferior” cultures. That’s like asking if I bothered to understand the culture and needs of the cockroach infestation in my house. No one does that: we just act to annihilate the little buggers.

And that was the US policy in West Asia — the same as the US policy everywhere, which is the only policy that “empire” ever has: genocide. Empire cannot exist while other cultures exist in contrast to the imperial culture, especially if those cultures have sovereignty and self-determination, for then they will certainly reject the empire’s control — control that is never to the benefit of the subjugated people, nonsense about roads and aqueducts notwithstanding, but is always to their great detriment.

So the empire must do genocide, and it has only two methods for accomplishing this. The first is assimilation. In the past colonial era this was the task of missionaries. Yes, they were genocidaires, every last one of them. The entire purpose of the missionary is to destroy the local culture and replace it with the imperial culture (but with the locals in an inferior role, of course).

How this is overlooked by most people is astonishing to me. It is blatantly obvious. What do these people think the purpose was of all the “Indian schools” in Canada and the US? What was all this nonsense about forbidding their language, cutting their hair, forbidding their religions, etc. if not GENOCIDE? Imperialist, please!

And when the assimilation form of genocide fails, well, there is slavery (generally with religious justifications — especially the Western religion of “science”), and if slavery won’t work (see “American” aboriginals), then the goal is simply annihilation. Everyone understands this form of genocide. And everyone knows that the US (and GB before it, as well as every other “empire” — see Belgium) has engaged in numerous genocides of both kinds.

It’s all empires know how to do. And not just to “foreigners”! Self-determination of the working classes or “middle classes” (a recent invention) is even more threatening to the parasite class, so they, too, must be genocided. This is the job of Hollywood and the media. And when that fails to destroy the culture, well, that’s when the police and military and the carceral system come into play. This has been most obvious with minorities, the worst case not being the “Blacks” but the aboriginal peoples who continue to be tortured and murdered in large numbers — a successful genocide. But the genocide of “Black” Americans — a political class not a skin color — has been blatant and very successful as well — and almost completely ignored by the privileged (but still subjugated) “White” middle class.

What does the average American think is the purpose of food ghettoes, redlining, the prevalence of liquor stores and check-cashing scams and pawn shops and toxic waste dumps and more in minority neighborhoods, the starvation of the public schools in those neighborhoods, the racial profiling of the entire carceral system which appears to be devised entirely to promote and protect white supremacy, and on and on (not to mention the cultural appropriation and cooptation by “whites” of everything “black”). And the genocidal US “health care” system that prices out most minorities and ignores their unique medical needs (as well as those of women, who are obviously not human)?

So the whole speech is an exercise in propaganda and lies. Not one word of it is sincere, and even if it were, it paints a nonsensical world that denies the truth at every turn.

And yet, so many people who claim to "have a clue" are buying it hook, line, and stinker. Wow! The “hopium” and “copium” is choking me.

Today is a very hard day.

As you can see, Bob raises a LOT of questions, some of which I will address later. These are issues that so many of my coffee buyers and commenters have also raised, although not generally all at once, as Bob is doing.

The pictures are not Bob’s— they are mine - -just added to illustrate his points.

Zoo animals:

This is a yellow mongoose: one of my favorites at the zoo, who used to climb on my shoulder and nuzzle my ear while I cleaned her “habitat”, knowing of course I would bring her a couple live snakes. Yummy.

Chappy, of course, is good at killing (and eating) snakes which is how he got that Mansoni Worm, which I have to spend a small fortune (anything over a $100 is a fortune for me) to eradicate. I guess Mongooses get those worms, too.

Please support me and Chappy and Ichi by buying coffee at the buymeacoffee website. Article 4 of the Putin series is coming along nicely.