Trump's Truth Social network's ridiculous rule

Donald Trump's echo chamber app, Truth Social, which can be expected to be banned at some point in app stores, bans criticism of itself and probably of Donald Trump as well.

Not a good plan

My own view, expressed in an earlier post, was that this app might benefit Trump if it was introduced sometime around the next US presidential election as a means of creating publicity and controversy. However, it has instead started up just about now.

The companies that provide app stores don't allow people to download the other conservative alt-social media apps, such as Gab (which is a complete and utter nightmare of an app because of the lunatics using it, as I also explained in my earlier post). Sooner or later, Truth Social will just be banned too, making it no better.

More censorship

What is worse is the platform's apparent hypocrisy. Banning criticism of itself is about the most extreme a social media platform can go. It seems as if all this is just intended as personal revenge over Trump's Twitter account being removed.

Censorship should not be in the hands of companies and people who control them, such as Zuckerberg or Trump. Censorship is essentially a form of law enforcement action and should only be practiced based on the decisions of courts or orders handed down by government authorities, local or national.

East and West at war

Russia has defied Europe on a scale never before seen since the days of Josef Stalin. We are, without question, now moving into a new Cold War. How does Russia justify what the EU has described as "barbaric"?

Russia's national security leadership may have valid reasons to stage a premeditated intervention in Ukraine, but the action is legally dubious, if this means anything anymore. Russian leaders likely foresaw an increasingly heavily-equipped Ukrainian irregular faction such as the neofascist Azov Battalion (Western journalists reject their reported existence as disinformation despite it being a fact), and feared that they may infiltrate Russian territory in future years with their increasing stockpile of NATO-supplied weaponry. Russia chose to nip this threat in the bud with a huge military operation and fully secure its Western frontier against NATO, whose leaders were already labelling Russia as their adversary to be confronted, years before the Russian intervention.

Inaction or vacillation on Russia's part could have been disastrous. NATO weapons were being sent to Ukraine's anti-Russian regime in increasing quantities, curtailing the potential success of Russian military action. With groups like Azov not necessarily following government orders, and accumulating sophisticated equipment and training, it would have been plausible for such people to launch opportunistic terrorist attacks in Russia. We could have seen an unconventional military campaign coordinated secretly by NATO on Russian territory using these irregulars (in concert with foreign-organised protests against the Russian government), to bypass a nuclear standoff while destroying Russia. It is fortunate for Russia that the conflict is taking place inside Ukraine, instead, and that this army of irregulars is being killed off prematurely inside Ukraine.

Ending Nazism again

It is a shame that a lot of anti-Nazis in the West did not notice the return of literal, gun-toting Nazism to Ukraine, with its thousands of armed stormtroopers, and have failed to appreciate Russia destroying Nazism for the second time. Instead, we see convoluted and cerebral claims that Russia is instead somehow analogous to Nazi Germany itself, based on the mere fact that Russia has soldiers and is sending them into combat against those people.

The Ukrainian government is not neo-Nazi, but it wilfully presides over territory filled with them and their weapons, and that makes Ukraine Russia's business.

To Russians: I assure you that some of us in Britain have not been brainwashed by false captions and lies from our government, but we instead still believe in the alliance of 1941-45. We appreciate Russia saving Europe from this Nazi scourge for the second time, and hope for their crushing and prompt defeat.

Russia's lesser evil

The haste with which everything happened, event after event, suggests that Russia had all of it planned or at least was creating contingencies with great enthusiasm (the law of the instrument), and that the recognition of the republics (DPR and LPR) as states is itself just part of a military strategy. The side that has been caught unprepared is Ukraine, which evidently just expected the eight-year war in Donbass to continue its slow creep even despite Western warnings that Russia would attack.

The West made the situation very bad for Ukraine. They seemed to be idiotic in their handling of intelligence by telegraphing their own actions in the press (timelines of equipping Ukraine, types and quantities of missiles, and the fact they were espying the Russian military build-up) to Russia, meanwhile failing to convince Ukraine of the imminent attack it foresaw. These idiots telegraphed how they expected Russia to attack, likely allowing it to adjust its attack plan. Many disbelieved the West, myself included, seeing all kinds of holes in what they were saying, because of their thorough record of lying while quoting intelligence officers, such as in the 2003 Iraq War. It is likely that the only beneficiary of the hysterical coverage was, in the end, the Russian military.

The main moral difference between Russia's intervention and the US and NATO interventions in various countries is that this conflict zone was close to Russia, and many of those suffering in the crisis area were Russian civilians, whether holding Russian citizenship or not. If the US or UK were in a similar position to Russia's position with Donbass, military intervention against the neighbouring country would be treated as righteous. The normal anti-war criticisms, decrying the government for bombing distant countries to capture oil and failing to bring stability, would be muted because the target country is not distant and the goal is clearly not oil. In addition, Ukraine was already highly unstable due to the US action supporting a violent takeover in 2014.

Arming freedom fighters in Ukraine

NATO's policy toward the crisis in Ukraine is erratic and reactive, and Russia has taken the initiative. The most popular view among Western leaders now seems to be to equip the Ukrainians with weapons, similarly to the effort to arm militants in Syria against Bashar al-Assad, which was essentially a failure and is probably less viable in Ukraine. Comparisons are made to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which the US reacted to by arming militants with Stinger missiles over a long period of time. It is doubtful that this comparison holds. The Russian military is not the Soviet military, being now highly specialised in countering insurgents in Syria. Russia likely has no fear of NATO-equipped militants, because it is already facing them in Syria and expects to face them in any case, whether in the Caucasus or elsewhere. From Russia's point of view, defeating such militants is to be pursued eagerly rather than avoiding them.

What is happening in Ukraine is a conventional war that will likely succeed in subjugating the country, if Russia wants to do that. If NATO wanted to preserve a place for Western influence in Ukraine, it would need to send tanks across the border into the western regions of the country immediately, to provide safe haven for those afraid of pro-Russian reprisals in the aftermath of this conflict. However, most likely, they will instead cling to neoconservative fantasies about aiding freedom fighters and repeating the 1980s struggle in Europe.

In a European country, a forced and inapplicable strategy of armed civilian resistance will only claim civilian lives and alienate people. Ukraine is not tribal. Treating it like Afghanistan will only amount to terrorism, prolonging suffering and death among those who want a decent life, ultimately turning the peaceful population against those staging attacks, in revulsion. Afghans are used to war and hardship, but the more important observation is that they have no choice. Even if we literally transferred all the Taliban to Ukraine, they would flee into the EU rather than wage a brutal insurgency. People's predicament in Afghanistan is due to geographic and cultural isolation, and this doesn't apply in Ukraine. Ukrainians won't resist like the Afghans, even under an occupation. Europeans will welcome refugees with open arms, and they won't volunteer to go back and shoot up their own villages or stage car bombings outside schools.

I believe that if the Afghan resistance model failed in Syria, it has no hope of success in Ukraine. However, if it does succeed, that insurgency will spread all over Europe, with car bombs and assassinations becoming a normal form of politics in European capitals, just as the Afghan wars resulted in such regional instability and terror.

The sum of NATO's arrogance and incompetence

What we have is the combined problem of a West that is too arrogant to follow international law consistently, and now this same West is weak and facing defeat in all its foreign policy gambits. To actually be the guarantor of international peace and security, a country has to both follow its own rules and display some success. The US has failed on both counts, spreading misery and violating international law for decades (my own main reason for distrust of the United States foreign policy), and now becoming craven and trying to use third countries to fight dubious battles, now goading pro-Western Ukrainians to get themselves killed.

Decolonisation should mean decolonisation

The word decolonisation is often thrown around by highbrow people. As if without realising that actual decolonisation (as in, dismantling the actual colonies) is far from complete, it is applied instead to things as innocuous as language.

The Western lifestyle, including the phone you may be using right now, is still dependent on exploiting colonised nations and preventing their development. Right now.

Child labour is still rampant in many parts of the world. Countries are still prey to exploitative Western multinational corporations that extract their rich mineral resources, returning very little to the people of the land. Despite this being a familiar trope in movies such as Avatar, it is very much a reality and those who tout their progressive leanings when they take power are doing nothing about it.

Hyper-aggressions of global exploitation

Western governments place sanctions on uncompetitive countries - a clear exercise of the vestiges of their colonial might when it comes to trade. Far from doing anything about this racism, self-styled liberals and prominent proponents of inclusivity who reach positions of power in government become complicit in the oppression.

While racial "micro-aggressions" are complained about in Western workplaces, the racial hyper-aggressions of those who exploit the African continent are what make those privileged workplaces possible at all. To strip countries of their mineral wealth is to steal from under the feet of colonised peoples, inflicting grave hardships upon them for the sake of our own comfort.

Ongoing struggles

Let us focus on the French, since they are probably the most blatant of the Europeans in their neocolonialism and seek to aggressively assimilate those who belong to other cultures.

In the Pacific overseas collectivity of New Caledonia, the French viciously hold the whole territory against the wishes of the indigenous Kanak people, as the local colonial French population serves to counter their repeated referendums for national independence. The desire to be a recognised sovereign nation was expressed by the Kanaks in a 2020 referendum, followed by another marred referendum in 2021 that was boycotted by many of them. France keeps the territory so its companies can rob the abundant nickel available there, ten percent of the world's total, with the mineral having electronic and military applications that serve to bolster France's retained imperial military might.

America is equally at fault. Elon Musk covets the nickel in New Caledonia for the production of electric cars. The same Elon Musk who openly expressed smug approval of the American-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so as to reach the country's rich lithium deposits. Like nickel, lithium is key to the batteries that make electric cars viable. Such interference at the expense of colonised people suggests a pattern of behaviour that could end up washing Western environmentalists eventually in neocolonial bloodshed.

In Mali, the the French showed an eagerness to maintain a military presence ostensibly to fight against terrorism, and later issued harsh criticisms of the government, but many suspect their real motives lie in their desire to control its rich uranium. A country where that is certainly the case is Niger, where, despite continued poverty, the country's uranium is shipped to France.

The UK's neocolonialism is not quite so blatant, as the UK is invested in the United States as a successor to the British Empire and consequently tends to just interfere wherever the United States interferes and join it as its lackey. While it is rarely talked about in any formal sense, this is understood to include secretly undermining certain fellow Commonwealth countries where the US has an interest in destabilisation and disorder, and this includes Pakistan.

Unequal exchange

As well as plundering lands of the resources that are the God-given property of the colonised people, the economic core located in Western countries and societies prospers at the expense of poorer nations through unequal exchange. Expensive products are created in the economic core in Western countries and societies, whereas the mineral resources that go into them are merely extracted in the impoverished periphery or Global South.

The maintenance of the economic core at the expense of the economic periphery is the very reason we have the lifestyle we maintain, so there is no incentive to change it. And it is directly the result of colonialism, which turned these nations in Africa into mere mines and sources of raw materials that often offer little of any competitive nature compared with the finished products created in the West. The resulting trade, in which undeveloped countries merely produce coffee beans, fruit or raw materials and ship them off to the West, while the developed core is able to sell cars and electronic goods, is unfair and perpetually sustains the place of one side as exploited while the other is the exploiter.

Western leaders are unable to extend condemnation of racism or colonialism to include the injustice on the international and economic levels today, because the very prominence and strategic military advantage that allows them to exercise dominance over other states is derived from it. Even as they speak of aiding other nations selflessly from their podiums, they are nothing without this vestige of racist exploitation and slavery.

If we are to be opposed to racism, this cannot be separated from supporting all those who resist Western government and corporate theft of other countries' resources. It cannot be separated from resistance to the warmongers and interventionists, who have the same moral character as racists.

Britain's "scaled back" decline and fall?

The central part of the UK's identity, the constitutional monarchy, may be more beleaguered and unpopular than ever, and now it is willing to cede ground.

In an earlier post, I expressed doubt about whether removing the monarchy is likely or possible, and concluded that the population would not support this. However, they probably would not do much to stop or reverse such a change if it simply happened, either.

The point about our country being a reactionary power is more a comment on the status quo-supporting mindset of people in the UK than a good basis to judge how the future will go. Eventually, things do change. If things have changed by stealth, regardless of what wishes people expressed, Brits tend to support whatever new status quo we are up to.

Bad signs for the Crown

There are signs that the monarchy really is on a slow path into history's dustbin.

The British people would not vote to get rid of the monarchy. However, they may well do nothing about it diminishing and disappearing out of public view. For most people, there would be apathy about this.

The worst wound to the monarchy is the Prince Andrew sexual abuse scandal. Now that that this has ended in an out of court settlement, paid possibly by the Queen using taxpayer money, many see Andrew as certainly guilty. He will not regain his titles.

Rather than plough through popular objections, reassert the Crown with new images of splendour, and spend ever more lavishly on themselves, the monarchy is beginning to yield to common complaints. We see this in the promise of a "scaled back" coronation of Charles and Camilla. This concession, made for cost, is likely unprecedented, considering that each coronation in the past would have been made with increasing fanfare. It is astonishing that Charles does not see the the danger.

Has the monarchy chosen to fade away?

With monarchs, it is all or nothing, at least in the public eye. A frugal monarch who removed the diamonds from the Crown, out of humble submission to the crowd, is nothing much to respect, and the image of that monarch will be greatly diminished in many minds.

One can compare this to the way the Roman Catholic Church has slowly adjusted its doctrine with time, taking no firm stand, to accommodate modern sensibilities. Perhaps the Papacy too will begin to shed its wealth, overwhelmed at last by changing perceptions toward the privileged. In their case, too, there would come a point at which placation became capitulation and the core identity of the Roman Catholic Church was lost.

For these ancient institutions, reform eventually becomes the exit strategy from their own existence. Ironically, budging for the demands of critics and spending less lavishly actually makes it more likely that there will be calls for such institutions to be eliminated completely, as they will start to look shabbier.

Those who would have held on to these institutions for merely the image of splendour would likely be the last to leave. Were the monarchy to find itself in a position where it inhabited dull offices rather than palaces, it would not take long for these offices to be closed as well. In other words, the monarchy may gradually fade so that it is not in the hearts of the next generation or two, such that it just gets abolished and quietly buried without anyone noticing it was ever there to begin with.

Consequences less severe from slow change

The removal of the Crown should be steady rather than abrupt. Sudden abolition could have a destabilising effect in parts of the Commonwealth, creating a number of new republics that may not not know how to forge ahead. It may mean the end of the Commonwealth entirely. The effects will not be contained in the UK.

We also have the movements for independence in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Were the monarchy to diminish or disappear, these movements would grow increasingly strong and the country could dissolve into republics and federations, while Ireland may unite. In such an event, whatever the UK turns into should maintain the Westminster system of government, as the former colonies did, and maintain the palaces in their splendour as the Russians did.

Trudeau's war on peaceful protesters

Seemingly violating the law in his own country and certainly violating his own pledge to support peaceful protesters, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a hypocrite.

Events in Canada reveal the despair of many people living under anti-populism and misanthropy. In such a regime, the energy and funding of the politically educated goes into denigrating normal people, discrediting popular pleas and local interests, and revolving instead around highbrow condescension.

Strangely, the anti-popular impulse of Trudeau, like the Democrats in the United States, is referred to usually under the lie of safeguarding democracy or democratic institutions, when in fact it is aimed at suppressing the will of an irritated and uncomfortable population.

Filtering out the lies

It should be noted that so-called journalists are equally involved in the state's misanthropy and crowd control, with their part in the tag team being to loyally defend the government, ridicule any kind of popular demands, and present themselves as pedantic teachers on what ideas and causes are permissible. They also conduct "fact-checks" whereby they miraculously find that every popular demand against the misanthropes is based on disinformation or linked somehow to Russia, because some tall forehead at an intelligence agency said so in a patronising voice.

You may not be aware of it, but if you rely on mainstream media, it probably means the approved agendas spelled out at gloomy board meetings and gatherings of dirty sponsors are the only political causes you recognise or tolerate. The passion and colour in the things the mainstream corporate media have to say and what dissident cause they show as trendy (for example, BLM) is as artificial and false as what gets injected into grey food matter in a factory. Fact-checkers are also appointed by the same dirty method and are equally useless and uninterested in facts, instead representing the interests of the sponsors.

That being said, plenty of non-mainstream media are also full of fakes and equally driven by profit. One needs to subject all big claims to the tools of scepticism: find expert consensus from opposing interest groups or undisputed video or other raw source material, to determine if a claim can be accepted.

A people trampled

Crowd control is a reasonable way to describe the anti-populism in places like Canada and the United States. Crowd control, of the misanthropic kind that recently occurred when Canadian mounted police trampled a crowd and were rumoured to have killed someone, although they deny it. The fatality is unlikely to be real at this moment, given that it cannot be verified, but one only need watch video of it to see that those who ordered this were deliberately endangering lives.

The perilous threshold I warned of in this very blog, at which government employees cease to be protective of the population and begin instead risk outright violence and chaos with lethal consequences on a scale potentially worse than the virus they hope to contain, could get close. In the Arab world, we have seen how widespread protests, when met by dismissive and condescending responses by the state, can reach boiling point.

Widespread protests can give rise to protracted crises with significant potential for violence, not to mention a substantial drain on the state's capability to provide for the population. Ultimately, the decision to fight the people rather than listen to them may eventually undermine the state's own ability to respond to the pandemic, making Trudeau himself a threat to health and wellbeing in Canada. Trudeau could waste the government's resources on quashing dissent, resulting in more deaths from the pandemic than would result from simply cancelling the vaccine mandate and opting for a more polite response.

Hypocrisy at many levels

Is it worth risking grievous injury and death to citizens, as shown in the horse incident, for the sake of health policy? Is such a heavy-handed response by a state indeed aimed at health, or at protecting the condescending political circles the state evidently represents?

While describing protests as illegal, Trudeau himself illegally invoked his country's Emergencies Act prematurely as an excuse to begin clobbering his people. If he had indeed waited for the event when protests might turn violent, rather than making a very highbrow and strange academic argument about the "inherent violence" of the racist symbols he falsely claims protesters are brandishing everywhere, his use of the measures could be defended. As it stands, his actions are unsupportable and extreme and suggest what Trudeau did was an outburst of personal hatred against the protesters.

Trudeau has made pledges never to support anything like this, even abroad, yet he supports this on the streets of his own country. When farmers rightly protested peacefully in India, Trudeau said “Canada will always be ready to defend the right to peaceful protest.” Now, he is evidently okay with taking the risk of even killing protesters, rather than so much as acknowledging the widely heard popular demands that he change course on Covid vaccine mandates.

What is worse than an authoritarian is someone who pretended to be something else and can't follow his own pronouncements. If Justin Trudeau can adhere neither to his own pledge of support for peaceful protesters, nor his pledges to health that are the very justification for his violence, there is no telling what he might do.

Biden's neglect towards Afghans exposes sad truth

Being a sore loser about his defeat and incompetent retreat in Afghanistan, US President Joe Biden seems okay with stealing money from grieving mothers and putting children at risk.

Afghans, including even the Taliban, had nothing to do with 9/11 or international terrorism. However, American neoconservatives need targets to attack, and the Afghans seemed shootable to them.

Now, yet another neoconservative-stuffed administration finds it okay to take money from Afghans and hand it to 9/11 victims in a demonstration of what they really represent. This is intended to perpetuate the belief in American righteousness and victimhood, even as these neoconservatives stand unapologetically over the bodies of those they killed.

Twenty years of defeat

The United States occupied Afghanistan for twenty years, supposedly to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who was dead for half the time of that occupation. When the US entered the country in 2001, Afghanistan was in civil war, with the Taliban holding the capital but facing substantial resistance. The US allied themselves with the Northern Alliance, who were resisting the Taliban. According to the righteous neoconservative logic, an American presence would bolster a powerful coalition and secure inevitable victory.

When the United States departed Afghanistan in 2021, in despair and shame, the Taliban held almost total control over the country before US forces had even exited. With barely a shot fired, and with American troops forced to watch and be humiliated in front of the world, the Taliban were able to overtake the country in a way that had not been possible even prior to the US intervention. The US, or at least those who still maintain control over its foreign policy right now and faced no consequences for their careers, failed all their objectives and were kicked out of the country.

To give some idea of what that failure meant, let us consider the words of Joe Biden:

"We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need"

Every moment, every dollar spent, and every soldier killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan was a waste. The strategies and predictions of US think tanks and foreign policy experts all failed to materialise. All the propaganda and self-important rhetoric about democracy and freedom, which continues unabated but has shifted to other conflict zones like Ukraine, led nowhere.

Rewarded for creating misery

Rather than firing the people who caused the biggest foreign policy defeats in their history, America and its allies listen even more to the instincts of neoconservatives such as Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland, who maintain a familiar aptitude for false claims, false expectations, civilian casualties, and slow defeat. It is as if they have no thinkers with an interest in foreign policy other than these quacks who have a hundred percent chance of being wrong.

When hearing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the US is acting differently in #Ukraine than #Iraq because the US is trying to prevent a war this time, remember that he directly supported the Iraq War.

He is literally the liar he is trying to contrast himself with.

— Lordre (@LOrdreNet) February 20, 2022

By punishing the Afghan people when they needed help, Biden makes it clear that twenty years of alleged support for them was a sham as the US attempted to spread its own influence and power in the region. We should not forget that it is under moral pretexts and international media fanfare that the US coldly murders civilians and tries to station soldiers in every strategic region of the world.

We should be thankful for the end of the war in Afghanistan, but be under no illusion that it marks the end of American cruelty and oppression. The neoconservative (or interventionist, if you like) army at the heart of American foreign policy is continuously re-hired and sent to all conflict zones in the world to get more civilians killed, drag America further through blood and mud, and then fail.

The EU is cracking down, but risks cracking up

The European Union's attempt to impose a liberal monoculture on all member states risks destroying the entire EU project.

Unelected EU authorities, in this case foreign judges at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), have clashed with the parliaments of sovereign states that represent nations comprised of millions of people, threatening them with funding cuts.

Progress forced

Far from "democratic values", what the EU says it wants to impose on Poland and Hungary using funding cuts as a weapon amounts to some specific cultural changes. It is in the hope of changing their stubborn attitudes to LGBT content and immigration, that resistant countries are to undergo this forced conversion to the Euro-liberal ideology. Even if one supports this ideology and considers it to be a fulfilment of social progress, funding cuts seem like an awful way of achieving it.

The EU wants the power to ensure that the next generation in places like Poland are educated and inculcated in such as way that they will share the EU bureaucrats' cultural opinions, and will help stamp out their own local Catholic traditions and values. Without the monolithic liberal monoculture, which the Pope referred to as one-track thinking, the ideological righteousness and uniformity of a superstate can be in jeopardy.

Siege against the majority

What is happening is a basic failure of statecraft that creates significant division in even one country, let alone a confederation of multiple nation states. It is a rejection of the sovereignty of a people, which always leads to the oppression of that people. One cannot impose compliance with a set of cultural norms on a region or nation without oppression, such as as this financial siege the EU now threatens on disobedient countries.

Action by the EU is also unlikely to improve the situation for minorities the EU supposedly wants to make life easier for. They too will be hit by indiscriminate financial punishment of a country. As well as being morally problematic, financial punishment of a country due to the majority sentiment against a minority is folly from a pragmatic point of view. It may only increase acts of hostility by majority against minority, with the latter being now associated with a foreign siege against the nation, thereby having the opposite effect to what the EU hoped, even if the nation eventually yields.

Disregard for sovereignty

The utter disdain for the self-determination of nations, the very basis of democracy, being displayed by the EU is yet another manifestation of a familiar colonial arrogance. This disdain is part of the same mindset that brought Western armies to Afghanistan, only to cause more suffering and problems before falling back in retreat after twenty years of failed vision.

Many people value their national culture and identity more than any economic benefit, which drove Brexit against unheeded warnings of empty shelves and queues. Rather than give in, people in places like Poland should be prepared to endure significant hardship to resist and abandon an imperious confederation

If the Poles eventually decide they have had enough of the EU, they can always look to the seas, learn from Britain, and count on us as a trading partner. In addition, it would not take long for other countries to leave.

Bosnia likely to fall apart at some point in the future

Comprised mainly of two parts, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, Bosnia is an irregularity on the map of Europe.

The beautiful Balkan region has long been unstable, with Sarajevo being the flashpoint where the First World War began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and with attempts to create multi-ethnic states consistently ending in failure there. With the massacres of the Bosnian Genocide, it is a land filled with grudges.

A history of disintegration

The "clash of civilisations" theory of Samuel P. Huntington would hold that the former Yugoslavia is always potentially conflict-ridden because it has seen the competing presence of Catholic, Islamic and Greek Orthodox civilisation. The theory may be too simplistic, but the region is indeed a hotspot of historical grievances.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire failed, Yugoslavia failed, and what exists there now has no particular guarantee against failing again. As geopolitical tensions rise, especially between NATO and Russia in Europe, lines are being drawn again in Bosnia.

Battle lines drawn

Republika Srpska is turning away from the central government in Bosnia and is seeking an imminent breakup. It is being equipped with weaponry from Russia and China, in anticipation of the breakdown of the international liberal order that is now openly challenged. Meanwhile, the Western-allied component that rules from Sarajevo seeks NATO membership. If conflicts heat up around the world once again, there may be no avoiding a war of further disintegration in Bosnia.

The position of the central government in Sarajevo is, of course, fundamentally hypocritical. Their country unilaterally seceded from Yugoslavia, and yet now they declare that there may be no secession from their authority by Serbs. There is no moral justification for supporting Bosnian separatism and rejecting Serb separatism.

In the event of a renewed conflict, there is no denying the inferior strategic position of the Serbs. They are cut off from their natural allies, the Russians, just as they were in the First World War, and enveloped by the NATO powers. However, the Serbs have been swallowed by many empires before, and have proven to be a bellyache to them. They were no gift to the Ottomans, to the Austrians or to the Nazis, and Western-allied Europe would be foolish to volunteer to go through the same symptoms.

What the Special Relationship is not

While Britain and America tend to form a united front in our foreign policy, our constitutions and values are extremely different, and claiming they are the same is inappropriate.

The Special Relationship is presented by dubious minds at the forefront of British foreign policy, like Liz Truss, as if it represents some form of ideological hegemony based on values of freedom and democracy emanating from Washington. In reality, there is no such thing. We speak the same language, but the British state is actually more different from the United States than even the Russian state is.

The last time anyone checked, the United Tsardom of Russia did not still seem to have a tsar and a council of unelected barons who could impede their parliament's will. That, however, is what the United Kingdom still has.

The bureaucracy and the plutocracy

The idea that Britain has anything like the model of democracy in America is absurd. Countless things are considered acceptable in the US that are considered unacceptable in the UK, and vice versa. Take, for example, campaign funding and lobbying. The US has virtually no rules on that whatsoever, considering money to be speech and therefore any restriction on it to be a violation of freedom of speech, whereas the UK has rules. This makes the character of the two regimes completely different, to such a point that they could justifiably deny that each other are true democracies at all. If we were in a mood to quarrel, America would accuse the UK of stifling political opposition with bureaucratic red tape, while the UK would accuse America of being a plutocracy.

Another example is the freedom of speech itself. In the US, that is actually enshrined in the US Constitution as a protection for all speech, no matter how offensive - something Prince Harry referred to as "bonkers", to the consternation of Americans. In the UK, you have the freedom of conscience, but how you disrupt the lives of others with that freedom is very much restrained by the law. The government can't suppress someone's beliefs, but a citizen also can't just go out and offend people, as there are laws against it in Britain.

Then there is the right to bear arms. From a British perspective, this is an absolutely unacceptable, bizarre, and menacing idea. In most cases, even British police don't carry arms, while American police have tanks.

Acting on values would make the UK bash America

The point is, in an actual value-driven world, there are more than enough areas of violent disagreement on ideology and constitution for the UK and US to be sworn enemies, certainly not allies. The facts are enough to ridicule the notion that our coalition is somehow standing up for democratic values. Our own regimes and attitudes to governance are fundamentally different and incompatible with each other, to such an extent that we could completely deny each other's legitimacy as states and yet still be fully compliant with our values.

If the UK were to be a foreign policy adversary of the US, the latter would level a host of meaningful criticisms aimed chiefly at the monarchy and the House of Lords, decrying them as undemocratic features. Stock criticisms of the other regime are standard practice when the US has an opponent. Indeed, the UK maintains highly undemocratic vestiges, doing so for the sake of stability and tradition.

The 51st State

There have been reforms in the UK that appear to be aimed at making Britain more like America, such as the creation of a Supreme Court and calls for the abolition of the House of Lords. Whether the creation of the Supreme Court was for the best is not entirely clear, and there are fairly good arguments from both sides. However, British use of American nomenclature is arguably just superficial, aiming more to help maintain the illusion of a shared democratic culture than make it a reality.

On the other hand, considering how stable and reliable the UK's system had been for centuries, reforming is always a bad call. Healthy forms of conservatism rest on the assumption that there are certainly unknowns in revising anything, and that a stable and decent past provides sufficient grounds not to change things very much, even if we have no evidence that reform will go awry. A system that averts a brutish and short life is a good one, even if it is less democratic.

Most would agree that the UK can learn some good features from the US, and that the US can learn some good features from the UK, but it seems indisputable that the UK has a better system. The UK is not plagued by ideology, sectarianism and sedition, and does not have an overpowered executive branch.

UK system is just better

Countries that followed the Westminster system effectively maintained order even in some of the most historically conflict-prone regions of the world, while those that instead emulated the United States were prone to disorder. What the Special Relationship is not, is anything to do with actual constitutions or political values. The UK is quite different from the US as a regime, aside from the shared language.

The Special Relationship has only ever been a mutual attempt by the US and UK to manipulate the other and use the other as an instrument of one's own interests. The US sees the UK as an aircraft carrier off the shores of Europe, while the UK still sees the US as a youthful successor to the British Empire.

"Brexit Freedoms Bill" looks like a thinly disguised horror

Brexit was marketed under the slogan of taking control. However, what is being presented by PM Boris Johnson as the "Brexit Freedoms Bill" is fast coming across as a betrayal of that promise, giving control to ministers and not even to this country's Parliament.

The idea that Parliament might approve something that disempowers their own Houses and robs them of their duty to the British people seems scandalous. Even if you supported Brexit as a means of freedom from foreign authorities in the EU, it is an absolutely good thing that each and every item of EU legislation should remain in force in the UK until debated and struck down by Parliament.

Individual laws should be confronted

When something is in force, and there is no specific demand to remove it, it can be taken to have the tacit approval of the population, a sort of informal contract. To seek powers that suddenly pull the rug from under the feet of the British people, striking down regulation that they may in fact approve of, without giving MPs the chance to intervene on their behalf, is no favour to the British people.

Now that Britain has left the EU, the Conservatives have every right to argue against and strike down specific bits of EU legislation, or even large portions of it, and they should be pleased with that, rather than trying to remove all of it in a single chop. The desire to strike everything down at once is suspicious, especially considering that many environmental protections were enshrined in EU law and mirrored in UK law.

Remainers were right on this

Even as it seeks the authority to strike down EU legislation without debate, the Conservative government is avoiding making the most of Brexit to benefit the people, such as scrapping the minimum five percent VAT on energy bills enforced by the EU. Such behaviour points to a government that exploited genuine wishes for a divorce from the EU, to pursue power-grabbing and greed.

Remainers warned about this moment for a long time, and they were probably right that Conservatives were only in it as a scheme to benefit business interests. Whether or not they want to continue appending comments denigrating the many millions of people who sought Brexit, their point is valid and must be heeded at this stage.

Right now, the British people are not taking control of anything, but helping ministers take control and override Parliament. People voted to leave the EU because they wanted more control over the laws of the land, not less control, so now there is something for Leavers and Remainers to all agree on, provided that they can put aside partisan loyalty.

World War Two comparisons and Churchill cosplay

When it comes to foreign policy, British politicians are overly fond of characterising themselves as Winston Churchill fighting against an evil aggressor abroad.

The UK has been trying to negotiate its own tripartite security pact with Ukraine and Poland, in a repeat of actions that contributed to the outbreak of World Wars One and Two. As such, it seems that the idolisation of past wartime leadership is so ingrained in British politicians that they don't mind repeating those men's mistakes.

1939, again and again

Britain's Defense Secretary Ben Wallace claimed there was a "whiff of Munich" when he visited Moscow, while continuing to warn about an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. What is it with the constant World War Two comparisons, which were going on even during the Iraq War?

What is happening with these politicians is a kind of cosplay. Like lesser Roman emperors, they have no identity of their own (except maybe Boris Johnson) and have to compare themselves with prior historical characters or dress up as them, as UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss did in Moscow. And it is a portrayal of characters - as in, fictional ones. Living in comfort, it is possible that some subconscious part of us forgets that history actually happened, with our minds instead processing it only as song and story. Most of us who think of historical figures instead think of actors portraying them on a screen. Mixed with pervasive monitoring, social media, and the transformation of politics into live entertainment, the effect may be to blur the boundaries of reality and fantasy even among those involved in important policy decisions, resulting in a sense of stardom and glamour among political figures who should instead focus on reality.

Russia only needs to be compared with Russia

It is a well-known fallacy to point out that the other side, e.g. Vladimir Putin's Russia, is acting in some way like Adolf Hitler or Nazi Germany, but this fallacy has nevertheless become a talking point of British politicians. The refutation is clear: so what? Hitler enjoyed cream cakes as well, but that isn't a refutation of them.

Both sides annexed land and redrew the borders of Europe in World War Two. In fact, the Kremlin redrew more borders prior to, during and after World War Two than the Nazis did. The anti-Hitler Allies even demanded the redrawing of borders and division of Germany as a condition for post-war peace. The Nazi comparison is ridiculous, when Russia's actions are better compared with other Russian actions that the Allies approved of. Even the creation of the Eastern Bloc was agreed by the Allies themselves.

Repeating past mistakes

The assumption that the UK was a blameless and righteous power in earlier conflicts, and that the same approach should be cosplayed to maintain European security now, is also wrong.

The UK made strategically and morally dubious commitments in both World Wars and helped to start them. Britain's alliance with Belgium committed it to fight there in World War One, and was stupid. After the horrors of that conflict, the recognition that it was wrong to sacrifice so many men and deplete our own strength to protect a small country that would hardly appreciate it set in. That was the logic of Neville Chamberlain.

However maligned Chamberlain is, he had a point, from a moral perspective. As with Belgium, arguments about Britain defending Poland were irrational. Britain could not in fact help Poland, for purely logistical reasons, so it was making a pledge it could not fulfil. Of course, that did not make Britain's role in starting the war irrational; the pledge was simply fake. The strategic basis for waging a war on Germany and forgetting about Poland's fate was rational. Nazi Germany was an unacceptable competitor. Then, they conquered resources in Czechoslovakia and Poland and became an even more unacceptable competitor. The declaration of war was a choice in Britain's interests, not Poland's.

The Second World War is considered to be a just war. A consensus on that is still essential to the global security maintained by the victors of the war, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. However, it was only truly known to be a just war at some point during it, when evidence of Axis atrocities was clearer. In the early days of the war, the conflict seemed like no more than a repeat of World War One.

Unnecessary grand alliances

The First World War was not a just war, and was not necessary for Britain. It was solely the result of faulty moral proclamations about protecting Belgium from the propagandised "Hun". It was not worth the loss of life to Britain, to prevent the Germans from humiliating France as they did in the Franco-Prussian War and were attempting to repeat.

The current pre-"World War Three" tensions in Eastern Europe are a lot more like those of World War One than World War Two. There is no clear indication that the other side is evil, carrying out any sort of mass atrocity, or planning anything truly offensive to humanity, so there is no moral case to make an alliance.

Britain has no strategic need for Ukraine or Poland. There are no cultural, linguistic or historical ties to either country. These is no reason to share their burdens, anymore than there is a need for us to share Morocco's burdens and side with it against Western Sahara. They are completely irrelevant, and yet our necks are potentially being risked for them.

It seems as if, in their eagerness to become heroes by re-enacting World War Two, British politicians have forgotten not just the horror of that war but the horror of World War One. Their cosplay is being done with no apparent goal in mind other than their own stardom.

No, a government's word is not evidence

In a normal and healthy polity, one can accept the word of the state as factual. However, as failings mount, it becomes impossible to actually maintain that trust.

If we are determined to be sceptics, then, in all cases, what officials said can only really be evidence of what they have said. It can be reported accurately as the rationale behind their decisions, and whether we adhere to the narrative might be considered evidence of loyalty to the state, at least until evidence emerges that the state is mistaken.

The word of Uncle Sam as ultimate truth

In a verbal duel with journalist Matt Lee of the Associated Press, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price insisted that the US government can be accepted as an honest source of information. Specifically, Ned Price wanted his far-fetched allegations about a Russian false-flag operation in Ukraine, including references to unpublished and undisclosed video evidence, to be reported by the press as facts.

Looking at the journalist as if he was crazy, Price suggested that the words he (Price) was uttering may be printed by Lee onto a piece of paper, and that this paper can then be given as evidence. When told that he had presented no evidence, a flustered Price went on to claim that not believing his classified US sources would be tantamount to adoration towards Russian propaganda.

Obvious baloney

Not only is there valid reason to doubt Ned Price's honesty, but there are clear indications he and his organisation were lying.

Explicit references by Price to video media, accompanied by no release of such video media, indicate deliberate dishonesty of the same type most of us already know as "clickbait". An honest source that could only give its word would not speak words about a video. Such a source would instead admit that it can only give its word, hand on heart. To speak otherwise, and make reference to specific undisclosed video, is a tactical move aiming to deceive, like offering a preview of a video to an audience, only to then provide a narrating voice throughout the actual file.

This reference to video evidence that won't be released is clearly intended with cynicism. The aim is to mislead those who glance headlines in our busy age into mistakenly thinking video evidence exists that they just don't have time to look at. Without a video, someone wants you to react as if there is a video. Ask yourself, is such a tactic typical of authentic behaviour, or is it in fact deliberate dishonesty and manipulation, in keeping with the character of liars?

Flipflopping on command

As soon as the CIA deems something to be acceptable, all American institutions and journalistic outfits immediately start saying it is acceptable, ultimately making reference to it being the CIA's wish. Wikipedia cites US intelligence officials as arbiters of fact, ignoring any need for independent confirmation. For them, it is America first, and all other countries' points of view are rejected as disinformation. Fact-checkers then rely on this US-aligned source to distinguish fact from falsehood, which is then used to inform labelling on social media platforms.

In the case of the Wuhan lab leak theory, which is still unconfirmed, it was originally labelled as false while the CIA did not agree with it. As soon as US intelligence officials began stating that it was credible, the label was lifted by international media and social media platforms and the story was considered credible.

Are liars reliable sources?

Unfortunately, the CIA and NSA have a clearly established record of telling lies, as in the case of the Iraq War and mass collection of Americans' data. The targets of these lies are often the American public and even elected officials, as the CIA tries to disseminate whatever it finds expedient or in its interests for you to believe.

Ned Price formerly worked for the CIA, as did many of the venerated and undisputed heroes of current American foreign policy. Sordid organisations with dark pasts, committed to lies and omission, devoted to the prosecution, defamation and torture of journalists, are presented to Americans as windows into all truth about the reality they inhabit.

Cold War redux is disastrous under continued terror threat

Rather than defeat anything during the so-called war on terror, the United States instead caused a proliferation of threats. Despite having lost, it decided to restart Cold War tension in Europe and Asia.

Under such circumstances, the possibilities available to undefeated terrorist groups are almost infinite. While it is a good thing that local forces may now be entrusted to defend their own interests against terrorists without Western intervention, international terrorist groups may quickly gain the ability to inflict disaster on the new Cold War belligerents while their backs are turned.

End of Days

We have no idea how groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda view the developing Cold War between People's Republic of China and Russian Federation on one side, and the United States and European Union on the other. However, most likely, they view it as a chance for respite and an opportunity to plan new attacks.

By far the worst possibility is an apocalyptic one. Terrorist interlopers could infiltrate the battlegrounds of this new Cold War and stage operations aiming to draw the superpowers into destroying one another in a nuclear escalation, threatening everyone on the planet in the process. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are considered to be irrational actors in international relations, so they may believe this is a doable and beneficial operation for them. Even if they understand the consequences, ISIS or al-Qaeda leaders could decide they will bring about the end of days.

The Russian front

One policy that could present an opportunity for ISIS is the expansion of NATO across Eastern Europe, potentially up to the Russian border. This presents a region where militant anti-Russian sentiment in countries such as Ukraine results in a willingness to accept help from anyone, including potential international terrorists, in an effort to confront what they see as the Russian threat. They want to join NATO, but an anti-Russian ISIS or al-Qaeda fighter or a neo-Nazi is just as much of an attractive ally for them and they are delighted with them all.

Imagine a day of tension along a huge, thousand-mile frontier between NATO and the Moscow-led CSTO alliance. That is what the frontier would be like, if Ukraine joined NATO. Somewhere - anywhere - along that broad front, is an ISIS cell in possession of a small armed drone they put together in cooperation with anti-Russian fighters in Ukraine. Their intention, against the wishes of the Ukrainian government and NATO, is to attack the Russians with it, and provoke an incident. The Western side is too naïve to have imagined the scenario, and the Russians are too focused on the massive NATO threat to see the subsequent explosion as anything other than the opening of a NATO attack on the local Russian nuclear forces based in the area. Without any delay, the Russians launch tactical nuclear weapons at assigned targets inside NATO Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland, fearful that any delay may give the West a chance to neutralise these weapons. Every subsequent escalation would then be a loss to the West and East, and yet a victory for ISIS who secretly started it.

Avoiding the premature end of the world

The solution to the above scenario would be for NATO to step back from the Russian frontier, agreeing to a demilitarised zone (DMZ) of buffer states or regions between the two sides, since this would avert a situation of continuous tension and distrust along a thousand-mile frontline. To agree to such a DMZ, NATO would have to realise that a tense frontier simply takes power away from political leaders, decreases security for all, and possibly empowers third parties and low-ranking officers with the ability to start a war neither side wants. As well as giving ISIS or al-Qaeda the ability to start World War Three, a NATO-Russia frontline could even give solitary lunatics this ability if they shoot over the border between the two sides.

The delusion that one can simply abdicate from an existing war without winning it, and declare a different war, is extremely perilous. On the one hand, it suggests that Western politicians exaggerated the terrorist threat over a period of twenty years. Perhaps they don't really take it as seriously as they said they did, seeing it just fine to forget about it without even having accomplished anything nearly like a victory, but rather a defeat in Afghanistan. On the other hand, it may signal a false belief that a mortal enemy was defeated when it wasn't. A US decision to take the fight to Russia and China, when ISIS is still out there looking for opportunities to destroy both sides, may well be as idiotic as the West hypothetically deciding to focus all their resources against the Soviets before the Nazis had been defeated.

No cooperation on terror threats

Finally, even discounting the above scenarios as unrealistic, which they might be, the new Cold War potentially eliminates all possibilities of cooperation against international terrorism. The Russians and Chinese, and possibly the Turks (because the West is so much against them too) refusing to cooperate on terrorism could be fatal to the West. It could result in Europe being abruptly flooded with tens of thousands of armed militants keen to take the battle into Westerners' living rooms, high on victory in Afghanistan.

Cancelling Islam won't help France

The prevailing reactionary and liberal camps within the Western liberal democratic model of state are equally incapable of accepting Muslims, and the best display of this failure is in France.

The French decision to close the French Council of the Muslim Faith because of perceived undue foreign influence reflects a desire to create an alternative Islam acceptable to Western liberals. What Western countries want is a local sedated, liberal-friendly Islam that is okay with cartoons of Islam's Prophet and supportive of Western wars on Muslims.

Macron's Islam

What Western countries would prefer to see is a completely reinvented Islam with an edited and redacted holy book, to support their interests and only attack China and Russia at the behest of Western diplomats. This is consistent with prevailing political sentiments in the West, which emphasise eliminating unacceptable views by cancelling them and are not interested, in the slightest, in how dear such views are to people from other civilisations.

We are seeing what will culminate in the complete failure to construct a multiconfessional state along liberal lines in the West, even as the West's population declines and migrants from other cultures become essential to economic performance. The requirement that it must be okay to offend culture and faith will never be able to coexist with being welcoming to people from other cultures, no matter what desperate policies are pursued by countries like France.

Countries that want to rectify other cultures when offended by them, yet at the same time wanting freedom for themselves to offend such cultures, are pursuing a doomed model. There is no example of any multiconfessional state in history that was both defiantly liberal and accommodated very different religious communities successfully.

Multiculturalism can work, but not with liberalism

Multiculturalism can succeed, but must be done within strict constraints that preserve the autonomy of the cultures concerned and treat them with the utmost respect. France's desire to assimilate and make sure that every cultural change comes at the expense of other cultures rather than France's is a mistake, when France was the colonial power and France made the decision to govern members of other cultures. That comes at a cost, and France must pay it by allowing its own character to change as a result.

Neo-colonial France's arrogant domestic policy against Muslims is matched by its arrogant foreign policy against Mali, demanding this country adhere to its political values and model, although the real goal is to exploit the country's gold and uranium. However, cancelling Islam and declaring cultural superiority won't help France escape the consequences of its own decision to become a multicultural empire.

Warmongering and hate crimes are inseparable

It is no accident that the opponents of racism are also often the opponents of war. That's because war causes racism, racism causes war, and warmongers have the moral character of the most violent racists.

Anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City rose by well over three hundred percent, in December. In San Francisco, they rose by over five hundred percent. Such attacks are taking place after Donald "the China virus" Trump left office.

Is this a random occurrence, or could it be tied to the that hate-filled rhetoric against China - or, to use the preferred term - "the Chinese"? Could it be the work of those who want us to believe we live on the verge of some great and imbecilic call to arms for the nation? 1914, repeated as farce?

Jingoism and violence

The endless, riotous war talk against "the Chinese" and "the Russians", portraying people's nationality as an inherently negative feature, deliberately peddled by politicians in the US and the UK, whips up paranoia and hate. Ironically, it will engender bigotry towards Eastern European people as much as the Russians, and towards Pacific Islanders as much as the Chinese.

Jingoistic hate speech, protected by things like parliamentary privilege in the UK, is typical of political discourse one might expect a hundred years ago. Skeletons are crying out to us to shut up and learn something from the past.

The disease of warmongering

If the purpose of democracy is to elect moral representatives, it has proven to be an ineffective filter in the US and UK, instead collecting some of the most vile specimens who can be summoned in human form. Those we flatter as "hawks" are better characterised as boils on the flesh of humanity.

Many of the warmongers in the US Senate and Congress have stocks in American defence contractors and are essentially war profiteers. Those who don't, yet still pursue the militarist rhetoric of interference and domination in foreign conflicts, are more contemptible. They, for the sake of the flaws of their own narcissistic personalities, perpetuate suffering and prejudice for nothing more than personal glory and machismo.

Who are the "other side" in the new Cold War?

On 4 February 2022, China and Russia declared what they are all about. Multipolarity, multilateralism, and order are what they hope to offer other countries.

Defying the Western "rules-based order", the Russian and Chinese declaration expresses a commitment to the "international law-based world order". It calls for multilateralism over unilateralism, and the defence of the internal affairs of states against outside interference. In short, for them, the law takes precedence over moral proclamations in international relations.

Defenders of sovereignty

The Russian-Chinese declaration is a statement of opposition to Western meddling in other countries. The US's blatant attempts at regime-change when governments are not complying with Western liberal norms, as occurred in Syria, Venezuela and countless other countries, are recognised in the statement as something Russia and China are going to try to prevent.

It has to be pointed out that incitement of conflict and regime-change, like the West carried out in Ukraine in 2014, is the severest and most blatant kind of violation of national sovereignty. It is the precise kind of meddling that the very concept of sovereignty ever meant to abolish, violating the self-determination of peoples and forcing them to adhere to another country's model and ideology under its direct supervision even from thousands of miles away.

With their declaration, the Russians and Chinese express their willingness to thwart US-allied attempts at regime-change in other countries. It is an assurance to all the member states of the United Nations wishing to preserve their internal order against interference and ensure that they continue to develop naturally rather than being plunged into chaos by outsiders. This is a vision with cross-civilisational support all across the world, being appealing to a set of states so diverse it includes Serbia, Turkey, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Peru and even Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Unlike the Western unipolar disorder, currently bogged down in conflicts in Ukraine and completely defeated in Afghanistan, the multipolar order China and Russia suggest is an uncontroversial configuration that could actually be viable across the entire world.

A helping hand to all countries

It should not be underestimated how appealing the Russian-Chinese declaration will be to other nations. While everything the United States proclaims to member states of the United Nations is a vague threat or a demand for compliance with the US's will, the Russians and Chinese are pledging to mitigate this destructive behaviour by being supportive of countries under US pressure.

In other words, while the US tries to bulk up its aggressive military alliances, denigrate the rule of law everywhere, and overthrow the governments of the world, the Chinese and the Russians are driven by no objective other than preventing such capricious intimidation and violence. Instead, international law will steadily begin to gain teeth under Chinese and Russian protection, and Western attempts at regime-change will increasingly stall as the West's economic and military power gradually recedes.

Abolition of the US-led disorder

With its ideological proclamations and military alliances, the US can't avoid being bogged down in multiple conflicts with a whole host of different countries. It is driven by a craving for confetti-filled skies affirming its supreme importance, and for continuous tickertape parades of glory and victory for itself. What the US wants to accomplish, again and again, is the familiar world where its capricious authority, not the law, is paramount and countries must listen to America's every word. It wants to handwave away the sovereignty of other states and civilisations, declaring itself as the sole judge of whether a regime is legitimate, and judging them by comparison with its vain self. That is what is meant by the rules-based, or liberal international, order.

As of 2022, the US regime still views all other countries as inferior, devoid of agency, subject to US policy, or even completely under US jurisdiction. Such an attitude is in conflict with anyone who has a genuine interest in the shared wellbeing of humanity and would prefer the course of human history to take a path for the good of all rather than the glorification of a few.

In short, the hegemonic goals of the United States are fundamentally opposed to the goals of the United Nations and the authority of its Security Council. Unless the US is able to discard unilateralism, the UN could eventually reform against it and the US could eventually find itself or its NATO proxy states in opposition to UN peacekeeping forces backed by a majority of nations.

Rather than a communist bloc, it is now the multitude of diverse but law-abiding individuals and nations desiring some form of stability that are the "other side". Far from seeking a chaotic world devoid of US leadership and fraught with abuse, they recognise the liberal powers as the main sources of chaos.

Canada's Trudeau needs to listen to the protesters

Contrary to his speech denigrating protesters, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needs to listen to their demands and avoid alienating a huge portion of the population of his country.

The entire point of Covid-related policies is to prevent a crisis, and to prevent what is essentially a form of congestion in the state's ability to help the people. The whole idea of vaccination is to prevent the waste of the state's resources on treatments, the taking up of hospital beds, the use of supplies, et cetera. If the policies are instead causing exactly such problems or similar problems due to opposition, they need to be re-evaluated

Against interlopers

It should be unacceptable for those without knowledge of health matters to intrude into them and tell people what is best for them, and it is akin to malpractice or even murder. However, there is the problem of the reverse, when medical advice takes precedence over economic advice and even overrides any tact in how to handle human affairs or govern a country.

What has most likely happened is that governments, including the Canadian government, have surrounded themselves with health-focused advisers and bodies in an effort to focus on the pandemic, resulting in negligent handling of other affairs of the state. Alienation of the population and an inability to reach or convince many millions of people has resulted, because those advising the government are not skilled in that area.

The risks

The pandemic is one thing, but it is a whole other world of risk to try to confront huge protests and try to lecture the population on their personal choices, or force them to comply. This risk is potentially worse than the pandemic. Countries whose regimes find themselves at odds with their population but refuse to budge can descend into massive violence quickly, with potentially limitless casualties, far worse than the pandemic itself.

States need to consider that in order to help people, they have to be able to placate the population. Nobody appointed governments as arbiters of scientific accuracy, logic and the persuasion of the public to reason. In fact, states are themselves irrational structures based around memory, emotion, and stories sown into banner, edifice and icon. For them to pretend that they now represent the wills of rationalists and scientific bodies, and deny and chastise the masses and their beliefs, is absurd because that is hardly what any government was ever conceived to do.

Health policy must be balanced with respecting sensibilities of those who are ruled, which absolutely cannot be ignored. Vaccine mandates ought to be pursued where agreeable and plausible, and scrapped where not.

"Woke" isn't a useful term, should be avoided

While originating as a positive term, "woke" could become a pejorative used by the political right. It conflates a number of different things, and isn't useful.

Woke, like the other pejorative SJW (social justice warrior) points at all kinds of things at once, many of them being entirely appropriate or essential to a good state and receiving support from all across the political spectrum in every country.

The #MeToo movement

For example, the #MeToo movement entirely fits the descriptions of "woke" and "SJW" and represents the same generational change of values, and is responsible for bringing down both Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. No one will dispute that this is a good thing.

Will anyone, even the most extreme reactionaries, step forward to defend these men against the "woke" women who stood up to them? No-one? In fact, many right-wing Republicans love the #MeToo movement because it incriminated some specific Democrats. Therefore, by their own admission and by their own definition, even members of the extreme right are "woke", at least on this issue.

Anti-racism

Anti-racist activists mix with, and are often the same people as, anti-war activists, as is the case with the many in the Green Party of the United States. Anti-racism should not even be considered left-wing and is in fact simply responsible statecraft when one's country accommodates multiple races. It is bizarre that combating racism is even considered controversial. Most countries in the world accommodate multiple races and cultures, and preventing sectarian and ethnic tension is absolutely essential to maintaining the state.

Where anti-racism backfires, however, is when it increases tension and decreases community cohesion. If any ostensibly anti-racist policy increases tension or decreases community cohesion in any way, it is potentially damaging both to workers' rights and to the stability of the state and is bad policy. This is why the issue has to be handled sensitively, as it is in the UK, unlike the US.

Cancel culture

Cancel culture is the tolerance towards another person or group using their position in a company or organisation to arbitrarily deny and suppress points of view, perhaps with pressure from riotous groups and threats. It is increasingly done in companies and academic bodies.

Of course, some ideas are too fringe to be accepted, and the internet has created false expectations that even the most absurd ideas must be taken seriously and deserve time. The fringe ideologues will invariably shout about some extraordinary "censorship" and "cancel culture" destroying civilisation, despite the fact it would be entirely impossible for them to voice their ideas prior to the internet and current platforms existing.

Cancel culture is problematic due to its arbitrary and top-down nature. All it takes is for executives at the top of an organisation to deem even a valid statement as unacceptable (for example, Facebook might deem that criticism of Facebook is unacceptable disinformation). Then, it is completely scrubbed from public view. Control of virtual environments and control of platforms can allow things to be completely denied. It can be argued that the exercise of such power is of significance to the state, and therefore mandates the state taking it over instead of leaving it to private individuals.

As an example of what can go wrong, cancel culture has the potential to eventually come into conflict with the first example of the so-called "woke" politics, the #MeToo movement. If executives who happen to be in charge of influential platforms were accused on those platforms, they would be able to silence everything against them. Any arbitrary power eventually results in arbitrary enforcement of arbitrary rules and can create a group of people exempt from all the rules they force on others.

The confusion is bad

Rather than assigning labels, positive or negative, like "woke", people should use proper descriptions of what they're talking about. A lot of polarisation is probably the result of abject confusion, with people rallying around words that mean nothing.

People opposed to cancel culture may find themselves bitterly arguing with people opposed to sexism, without realising they hold the same views. They became attached to meaningless words they found on the internet, and wanted to hurl these words around.