Sneaking, not Slouching, into World War III

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Joan Didion’s 1968 Slouching Towards Bethlehem reflected on fragmentation of society and morality. Slouching, the idea of reluctantly and somewhat aimlessly getting to a “better place” is often referenced, not by realists or sincere critics, but by unhappy progressives, terribly concerned that we aren’t getting there soon enough.

When it comes to totalitarianism and its mass rape of communities and continents to increase state surveillance, state control, and state power, slouching is nowhere to be found. In pursuit of war and promotion of the state’s own welfare, we can identify not a single slouch, not a lazy man or woman in the bunch driving the statist train, the totalitarian globalist vision.

On the other hand, the masses employed by, and receiving temporary benefits from the state – through war employment, fascist corporate capitalism, and welfare statism – are never particularly productive. Their time, talent and energy is always misdirected and malformed, wasted at best and monstrous at worst. Unlike in a free society, where producers and consumers seek an ever-shifting balance to please themselves and others, driving production and innovation in a civil, tolerant and friendly way – state economies depend on war and fear of war to drive the majority into panicked groups, desperate to live for one more day, into smaller and smaller control systems or chutes, as it were.

We literally see this in Gaza today, the brutal trend unchanged since 1948. Intentionally starved, impoverished, and injured communities herded to and fro, into smaller and smaller pens, for the inevitable slaughter. If you cannot read or comprehend what is happening by design in Gaza, we have images and maps that summarize this process. It is not experimental; it is policy.

State extermination of Palestinians is also US policy, and it benefits the US kakistocracy. Zionists have many excuses for their institutionalized theft and murder, their ongoing genocide of Palestine’s non-Jews. God said we could steal it, bulldoze it, rape it, and kill the owners of it. Individuals who believe and act on this nonsense are found mainly in asylums and prisons; it’s good to be a state. Political Zionism is embedded with unsubtle European-style colonial racism, of the kind well-documented in George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days. United States government has actively perpetuated this racism and colonialism in lockstep with Israel for seven decades – even as most of the planet now condemns it.

There is no slouching here. Only ambition and hurriedness of the state, and sneakiness and deceit of the global politicians who serve it.

Ukraine recently attacked the most recallable, and thus most important, leg of the “nuclear deterrent.” As in the US, Russia has a nuclear triad consisting of ground-based missiles, nuclear-armed submarines, and long-range nuclear-capable bombers. Ukraine attacked these long range bombers on their runways deep inside Russia via a long planned, deceptive use of commercial truckers, leveraging Ukraine’s Russian language and cultural knowledge. The nature of the attack, and western celebration of it afterward, echoes Mossad’s September 2024 booby-trapped pager attack against Hezbollah.

There is debate over what is, and is not, a booby trap, because UN conventions specifically prohibit them in a doomed attempt to make war more humane. However, using modern supply chains and the interconnected world of commerce to conceal and conduct attacks is not uncommon – we saw it with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 using a Ryder truck, in the 9-11 attacks, fundamentally engineering both a terrorist attack using commercial passenger planes for the people, and saving Manhattan for real estate investors, instantly eliminating all the asbestos laden World Trade Center buildings with a double indemnity insurance payout for the rebuilding. In the era of information network and energy grid hacking, whole new departments of warfare have grown up on the back of how commerce is done. New and ongoing wars are conducted and funded through malware and ransomware, while the propaganda is easily created, broadcasted, and seamlessly adapted worldwide.

The acts of war through deceit and booby trapping are concerning, yet completely historical and entirely predictable. Moral chiding and political admonishment of such tactics is ludicrous, a Bandaid for a leg blown off, an aspirin given prior to a field amputation. We ought to be more interested in whether this tool is more likely to be used by a desperate and inevitable loser, as we see in the case of Ukraine versus Russia, or it is more likely to be the tool of the imperial authoritarian state against “the rebels” as we saw with Israel’s pager attack? What can we learn about the reality of power from booby trapping?

Given that what we have in Ukraine is not and never was “Ukraine” versus Russia, but rather a Western alliance led by the US and its key European dependents in an imperial play against Russia, the smart analysis may be that these kinds of tactics – appearing ingenious and “rebel-like” – are actually desperate moves of a losing Empire.

As Heraclitus observed, one can never step in the same river twice. Once a booby trap is exposed, the battlefield is irreversibly altered, and the new understanding makes the “enemy” wiser, and the perpetrator more endangered. Zelensky publicly celebrates his brilliance, in a way we saw last September in DC and Tel Aviv. Perhaps we shall see shiny paperweights depicting trucks with drones emerging throughout the capitols of Europe, much as we see gold and silver pager “replicas” left on the nightstands of Israel’s DC prostitutes. These evil touchstones, as with similarly celebrated extra-judicial assassinations, are part and parcel of Western politicians ritual adoration of war in the name of empire.

Once revealed and celebrated, once the toasts are made and the backs slapped, the problem of vengeful blowback from the targeted enemy nags like a coming migraine, or the inevitable hangover. Allies and enemies alike begin to think about how booby traps using modern economies and technologies can occur deep inside our own borders. Beyond that, subjects of empire everywhere begin to suspect that their own governments might be capable of shifting the “target,” to use a biblical phrase, in a blink of an eye. Is the rebel enemy lying in wait in our own back yard – or is that spidey sense telling us it’s really our own government, and its imperial allies, lying in wait?

Human intuition is individual, thus state efforts to reduce, ridicule, and overrule it are always a priority. The COVID exercise, with economic and educational lockdowns, state agitprop, and mass-mandated injections, corresponds very well to Phase III software testing, to “determine the overall efficiency of the units as they run together...because the program's overall functionality relies on the units operating simultaneously as a complete system, not as isolated procedures.” When every population on earth wants peace, but every ruling political party and their sponsors want war, the outlines of the real battle become clear. Actual people must act according to either their orders, or their intuition.

Upon learning of the Ukrainian truck delivery of drones to strategic bomber airfields, the reaction of some in the USAF was alarm, not of WWIII starting, but of their own vulnerability to such attacks, by an enemy, or as one of many false flags planned and conducted on American soil, against Americans, to push the state agenda forward.

Continued war in both Israel and in Ukraine is not wanted by any rational person, and indeed could be stopped by immediate elimination of Washington’s massive logistics, intelligence sharing, weapons, cash and political support. However, the state sneaks toward global war – envisioning a “limited” nuclear exchange that they believe will aid their own causes, and be immensely useful.