Bring the Tents: Another Crooke Monday

Tents at Columbia University

Tents in Australia

Tents being erected in Copenhagen today.

Substack author Brett Redmayne-Titley has written an essay, “On the Importance of Tents: Awakening to the real threat to the mind and the morals of Americans” I suggest my readers visit and thank uncle tungsten for alerting me to. His header citation and two following introductory paragraphs introduce us to the primary content of today’s Crooke Trilogy—Al-Mayandeen column, SCF essay, and Judge Napolitano chat:

“… we see the brutal repression that we have not seen in the [US] universities...The truth is that this unprecedented brutal repression...expresses at state of panic for the western system in general.”- Bashar al-Assad.

As University campuses across America attempt to re-educate their students that Genocide is intellectually “acceptable,” these university presidents and administrations have a problem: No matter how hard these Zionist-inflicted champions of re-education try, their students will not be convinced to rip out from their minds the page containing the definition of the word “Genocide” contained in the dictionaries of every campus library in America.

Duplicitous college presidents nationally cannot mandate that the students sacrifice the scholarship of their minds and fail to bear witness to 35,000 arbitrarily slaughtered Palestinians. University administrators will not magically make those of correct conscience-nor the students- go away. [Emphasis Original]

As the introductory photos depict, the student protests are now global, particularly in the Western nations that have shown support for the Gaza Genocide and the longstanding policy of Occupied Palestine generally. Biden and his NATO cronies are attempting to crush these protests with an Obama-like zeal when it came to Occupy Wall Street. However, IMO the fundamental emphasis and motivation for the protests as Crooke notes is far stronger but can it prevail over the brutality of the Fascist State; for that, we must wait and see. The first form of reaction to the protests is within the Title of Crooke’s Al-Mayadeen column, “Muddying the Water on US Student Protests” with the passage of a blatantly Unconstitutional bill by the House being a part of the reactionary’s further display of its Fascism:

Many of the incumbents of the leadership posts in Institutional America are either liberal Zionists or Evangelicals. Such a situation should be no surprise. The Washington Post, for example, asked Matthew Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), whether he planned to fund electoral challengers to the twenty House Republicans that voted against the Bill giving aid to the Israelis:

“The RJC is gearing up to spend upward of $15 million in what will be the largest targeted effort toward the Jewish community in critical battleground states across the country … We have a long-standing history of speaking out against folks who are anti-Israel, whether they be Democrats like “the Squad” and the progressives on the left, but also against folks who voice anti-Israel sentiments on the Right”. 

“We were the group that was responsible for defeating Congressman Steve King. We’re spending over a million dollars in Indiana this election cycle, to beat former congressman John Hostettler, who was one of the most anti-Israel voices in Congress during his tenure”. 

“Question: Twenty other House Republicans voted against the Israel bill. Do you plan to endorse challengers running against any of them?”

“Brooks: If there’s a credible challenger [on the ballot] to any of those people - we absolutely will be involved”.

Against this background, it should not surprise that as Edward Luce writes in the Financial Times, the US Institutional leaders are tied in knots over the campus protests. The angst in no small part hinges around the undoubted power of AIPAC and the RJC to make -- or break -- Congressional aspirants:  

“In practice”, Luce says, “adults from all walks — Republicans, Democrats, the media, and university administrations — are exhibiting the traits of hysteria and dogmatism they deplore in the young. It should come as no surprise that the protests are getting angrier. Students have every right to protest even with speech that many of their peers find abhorrent”.

Luce asks:

“At what point does anti-Zionism become antisemitism? The line is blurry. But most people — except to those in charge, apparently — can tell the difference between lawful protest, and calls to violence”.

But just to blur the distinction further: 

The US ‘House’ is advancing a Bill to codify the contentious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. The definition is contentious because most of its examples of antisemitism involve criticism of t"Israel", including calling "Israel" a “racist endeavour”. The Bill’s passage would mean the definition would apply when officials adjudicate Title VI complaints alleging campus antisemitism. The Bill passed 320 – 91 in the House.

“There is however another factor behind the Congressional hysteria: the protests have sparked fears of a repeat of 1968. Like then, the unrest began at Columbia University. As in 1968, this year’s Democratic convention will be held in Chicago. The 1968 convention was also a disaster because Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, sent his police into pitched combat with the protesters. The street battle dominated the media’s attention”. 

Luce however, draws a sharp distinction with 1968: “The chief driver of these protests is humanitarian” (as was not the case in the VietNam war).

But then, Luce resorts to the old canard: 

“Some of the demonstrators consciously subscribe to a Hamas worldview that would wipe Israel off the map. At what point does anti-Zionism become antisemitism ...?” 

This is where the issue is being muddied. Wiping "Israel", qua Zionism, off the map does not imply wiping it away by violence (though there is a legal right of resistance for those living under occupation).

Seyed Hassan Nasrallah (as the spokesman for the unity of Resistance Fronts) has made clear that the aim of the Resistance is to exhaust "Israel" -- and to drive it to a state of defeat and despair -- such that Israelis begin to recant the claim of special rights and exceptionalism, and become content to live ‘between the River and the Sea’ with others  (Palestinians), sharing in a parity of rights. That is, with Jews, Muslims and Christians living on a common territory. There would then be no Zionism.

Seyed Nasrallah explicitly foresaw the possibility of such an outcome emerging -- without major war. 

It is ‘sleight of hand’ therefore to cast the Hamas ‘worldview’ to be one of ‘wiping Israel off the map’ as if that implies ‘exterminating’ or killing Jews. "Israel" would be ‘off the map’ in the sense that a future state would not be exclusively Jewish in nature -- but multi-faith.

The Hamas ‘worldview’ sly imputation of antisemitism is  a calumny almost on a par with the slogan ‘Hamas is ISIS’. (ISIS had Hamas officials on their death list).  Hamas’ worldview cannot be stripped from the context of the hatreds ignited by the war in Gaza.

Most of Luce’s article relates to the issue of antisemitism -- but Islamophobia is growing at an accelerated pace, too.  It is important to de-bunk the ‘Hamas is ISIS’ meme in the West, lest such falsities slide us into yet another ‘war on terror’. [Bolded italics my emphasis]

Edward Luce is certainly the voice of the Establishment as becomes clear when reading his short bio—his parentage condemns him within the Class ridden UK. Clearly, Crooke’s concluding point must become part of the protest narrative that emphasizes whose Project it is to eliminate whom and why. It’s also clear the world has a problem when Christian Death Cultists have positions of power within the Outlaw US Empire, a fact that’s long existed but only now becomes cause for great concern. It must be recalled that only a small minority of such people share the Cult’s beliefs; but like all sociopaths, they’ve found a way to attain power they don’t deserve.

Crooke’s SCF essay shows how easily the Cult’s professed Liberalism is turned to Fascism to protect its criminality, “The Beast of Ideology Lifts the Lid on Transformation,” as the protests reveal what’s lurked behind the mask since 1945:

The Transformation is accelerating. The harsh, often violent, police repression of student protests across the U.S. and Europe, in wake of the continuing Palestinian massacres, exposes sheer intolerance towards those voicing condemnation against the violence in Gaza.

The category of ‘hate speech’ enacted into law has become so ubiquitous and fluid that criticism of the conduct of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza and the West Bank is now treated as a category of extremism and as a threat to the state. Confronted by criticism of Israel, the ruling élites respond by angrily lashing out.

Is there a boundary (still) between criticism and anti-semitism? In the West the two increasingly are being made to cohere.

Today’s stifling of any criticism of Israel’s conduct – in blatant contradiction with any western claim to a values-based order – reflects desperation and a touch of panic. Those who still occupy the leadership slots of Institutional Power in the U.S. and Europe are compelled by the logic of those structures to pursue courses of action that are leading to ‘system’ breakdown, both domestically – and concomitantly – provoking the dramatic intensification of international tensions, too.

Mistakes flow from the underlying ideological rigidities in which the ruling strata are trapped: The embrace of a transformed Biblical Israel that long ago separated from today’s U.S. Democratic Party zeitgeist; the inability to accept reality in Ukraine; and the notion that U.S. political coercion alone can revive paradigms in Israel and the Middle East that are long gone.

The notion that a new Israeli Nakba of Palestinians can be forced down the throats of the western and the global public are both delusional and reek of centuries of old Orientalism.

What else can one say when Senator Tom Cotton posts: “These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathisers; fanatics and freaks”?

When order unravels, it unravels quickly and comprehensively. Suddenly, the GOP conference has had its nose rubbed in dirt (over its lack of support for Biden’s $61bn for Ukraine); the U.S. public’s despair at open border immigration is disdainfully ignored; and Gen Z’s expressions of empathy with Gaza is declared an internal ‘enemy’ to be roughly suppressed. All points of strategic inflection and transformation – likely as not.

And the rest of the world now is cast as an enemy too, being perceived as recalcitrants who fail to embrace the western recitation of its ‘Rules Order’ catechism and for failing clearly to toe the line on support for Israel and the proxy war on Russia.

It is a naked bid for unchecked power; one nevertheless that is galvanising a global blow-back. It is pushing China closer to Russia and accelerating the BRICS confluence. Plainly put, the world – faced with massacres in Gaza and West Bank – will not abide by either the Rules or any western hypocritical cherry-picking of International Law. Both systems are collapsing under the leaden weight of western hypocrisy.

Nothing is more obvious than Secretary of State Blinken’s scolding of President Xi for China’s treatment of the Uighurs and his threats of sanctions for Chinas trade with Russia – powering ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine’, Blinken asserts. Blinken has made an enemy of the one power that can evidently out-compete the U.S.; that has manufacturing and competitive overmatch vs the U.S.

The point here is that these tensions can quickly spiral down into war of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ – ranged against not just the China, Russia, Iran “Axis of Evil”, but vs Turkey, India Brazil and all others who dare to criticise the moral correctness of either of the West’s Israel and Ukraine projects. That is, it has the potential to turn into the West versus the Rest.

Again, another own goal.

Crucially, these two conflicts have led to the Transformation of the West from self-styled ‘mediators’ claiming to bring calm to flashpoints, to being active contenders in these wars. And, as active contenders, they can permit no criticism of their actions – either inside, or out; for that would be to hint at appeasement.

Put plainly: this transformation to contenders in war lies at the heart of Europe’s present obsession with militarism. Bruno Maçães relates that a “senior European minister argued to him that: if the U.S. withdrew its support for Ukraine, his country, a Nato member, would have no choice but to fight alongside Ukraine – inside Ukraine. As he put it, why should his country wait for a Ukrainian defeat, followed by [a defeated Ukraine] swelling the ranks of a Russian army bent on new excursions?”

Such a proposition is both stupid and likely would lead to a continent-wide war (a prospect with which the unnamed minister seemed astonishingly at ease). Such insanity is the consequence of the Europeans’ acquiescence to Biden’s attempt at regime change in Moscow. They wanted to become consequential players at the table of the Great Game but have come to perceive that they sorely lack the means for it. The Brussels Class fear the consequence to this hubris will be the unravelling of the EU.

As Professor John Gray writes:

“At bottom, the liberal assault on free speech [on Gaza and Ukraine] is a bid for unchecked power. By shifting the locus of decision from democratic deliberation to legal procedures, the élites aim to insulate [their neoliberal] cultish programmes from contestation and accountability. The politicisation of law – and the hollowing out of politics go hand in hand”.

Despite these efforts to cancel opposing voices, other perspectives and understandings of history nonetheless are reasserting their primacy: Do Palestinians have a point? Is there a history to their predicament? ‘No, they are a tool used by Iran, by Putin and by Xi Jinping’, Washington and Brussels says.

They say such untruths because the intellectual effort to see Palestinians as human beings, as citizens, endowed with rights, would force many Western states to revise much of their rigid system of thinking. It is simpler and easier for Palestinians to be left ambiguous, or to ‘disappear’.

The future which this approach heralds couldn’t be farther from the democratic, co-operative international order the White House claims to advocate. Rather it leads to the precipice of civil violence in the U.S. and to wider war in Ukraine.

Many of today’s Woke liberals however, would reject the allegation of being anti-free speech, labouring under the misapprehension that their liberalism is not curtailing free speech, but rather is protecting it from ‘falsehoods’ emanating from the enemies of ‘our democracy’ (i.e. the ‘MAGA contingent’). In this way, they falsely perceive themselves as still adhering to the classical liberalism of, say, John Stuart Mill.

Whilst it is true that in On Liberty (1859) Mill argued that free speech must include the freedom to cause offence, in the same essay he also insisted that the value of freedom lay in its collective utility. He specified that “it must be utility in the largest sense – grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”.

Free speech has little value if it facilitates the discourse of the ‘deplorables’ or the so-called Right.

In other words, “Like many other 19th-century liberals”, Professor Gray argues, “Mill feared the rise of democratic government because he believed it meant empowering an ignorant and tyrannical majority. Time and again, he vilified the torpid masses who were content with traditional ways of living”. One can hear here, the precursor to Mrs Clinton’s utter disdain for the ‘deplorables’ living in ‘fly-over’ U.S. states.

Rousseau too, is often taken as an icon of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ and widely admired. Yet here too, we have language which conceals its’ fundamentally anti-political character.

Rousseau saw human associations rather, as groups to be acted upon, so that all thinking and daily behaviour could be folded into the like-minded units of a unitary state.

The individualism of Rousseau’s thought, therefore, is no libertarian assertion of absolute rights of free speech against the all-consuming state. No raising of the ‘tri-colour’ against oppression.

Quite the reverse! Rousseau’s passionate ‘defence of the individual’ arises out of his opposition to ‘the tyranny’ of social convention; the forms, rituals and ancient myths that bind society – religion, family, history, and social institutions. His ideal may be proclaimed as that of individual freedom, but it is ‘freedom’, however, not in a sense of immunity from control of the state, but in our withdrawal from the supposed oppressions and corruptions of collective society.

Family relationship is thus transmuted subtly into a political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals. With these atoms today groomed further to shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity, they are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state.

This is the deceit concealed in classical Liberalism’s language of freedom and individualism – ‘freedom’ nonetheless being hailed as the major contribution of the French Revolution to western civilisation.

Yet perversely, behind the language of freedom lay de-civilisation.

The ideological legacy from the French Revolution, however, was radical de-civilisation. The old sense of permanence – of belonging somewhere in space and time – was conjured away, to give place to its very opposite: Transience, temporariness and ephemerality.

Frank Furedi has written,

“Discontinuity of culture coexists with the loss of the sense of the past … The loss of this sensibility has had an unsettling effect on culture itself and has deprived it of moral depth. Today, the anticultural exercises a powerful role in western society. Culture is frequently framed in instrumental and pragmatic terms and rarely perceived as a system of norms that endow human life with meaning. Culture has become a shallow construct to be disposed of – or changed.

“The western cultural elite is distinctively uncomfortable with the narrative of civilisation and has lost its enthusiasm for celebrating it. The contemporary cultural landscape is saturated with a corpus of literature that calls into question the moral authority of civilisation and associates it more with negative qualities.

“De-civilization means that even the most foundational identities – such as that between man and woman – is called into question. At a time when the answer to the question of ‘what it means to be human’ becomes complicated – and where the assumptions of western civilisation lose their salience – the sentiments associated with wokeism can flourish”.

Karl Polyani, in his Great Transformation (published some 80 years ago), held that the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime – the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication – had but a single, overarching cause:

Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human way of being had always been ‘embedded’ in society, and that it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations i.e. to a civilisational culture. Life was not treated as separated into distinct particulars, but as parts of an articulate whole – of life itself.

Liberalism turned this logic on its head. It constituted an ontological break with much of human history. Not only did it artificially separate the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’, but liberal economics (its foundational notion) demanded the subordination of society – of life itself – to the abstract logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market”.

The answer – clearly – was to make society again a distinctly human relationship of community, given meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.

Polanyi would have argued that, absent a return to Life Itself as the pivot to politics, a violent backlash was inevitable. (Though hopefully not as dire as the transformation through which he lived.) [Emphasis mine]

The enquiring mind asks: Where are the student demonstrations and encampments in Russia and China? There are none since the Russian and Chinese governments have long made it clear that the Palestinians have rights and are entitled to the justice agreed to by the World that’s been denied by the Zionists and their allies since 1948, meaning that Pro-Palestinian protests align with national policy—there’s nothing to subvert, to quash.

Frank Furedi’s essay, “Woke Is Not The Problem – It Is the Symptom of Something Far Worse: It is the disturbing trend towards decivilization that should concern us,” which is linked by Crooke brings up a very powerful point that explains why many states are describing themselves as Civilizational States, none want to be ephemeral:

Throughout human history the sense of permanence served as a precondition for allowing people to dream of the possibility of creating something that was durable and built for the future. Based on the foundation of a shared past societies possessed a form of consciousness that encouraged the attempt to build a temporal bridge between the present and the future.

Without a sense of permanence there is little incentive to settle down, develop agricultural societies or build temples and cities. The prerequisite for the development and the reproduction of a sense of permanence is the cultivation of an organic connection between the present and the past. This civilisational accomplishment is essential for endowing human existence with meaning and for the development of stable social and individual identities. In contrast decivilization flourishes in historical moments when communities struggle to endow their existence with meaning.

It would seem the only thing that matters to those in power is power and the ability to be connected to it. Thus, the Fascist Liberalism that deludes itself as Progressive when its massively Regressive. And when it comes to Zionism, we have a manufactured basis for existence which remarkedly intertwines with the Evangelical Cult’s need for an entity capable of destroying Palestine to bring upon the death of all it craves.

The points Polanyi raised are also crucial and point to the deliberate reactionary rise of Neoliberalism and its Financial Capitalism that began in the 1880s that gave birth to the Era of Junk Economics and its Parasitic political-economy where there’s no such thing as unearned income and thus there’s No Free Lunch enjoyed almost exclusively by the top 10% of Western nations. Neoliberalism’s short-termism has no need for a past and future since it only operates in the next financial quarter. All of this goes to show there’s a very deep ideological battle happening that few are actively aware of and able to articulate. Within Neoliberalism there’s no room for humanity or empathy, only exploitation aimed at accumulation of Rent exists and the means to that goal. Thus, the death of nations and/or their depopulation is to be welcomed as progress as that eliminates resistance to such plans. Ukraine and recent WEF statements provide the basis for that conclusion.

In Crooke’s chat with Judge Napolitano, some of the above is delved into, but the wider discursions aren’t touched, which is fine since they require more time for honest discussion. And given the nature of YouTube, such avoidance is probably wise if the Judge wants to retain his channel. But back to the tents and their student protesters. Theirs is one facet that was absent from the Outlaw US Empire’s first deep dive into Fascism during the McCarthy Era, although IMO it/we have never emerged. The utter falsity of Neoliberal Junk Economics has become The Dogma and nothing is allowed to challenge it—There’s No Free Lunch has become Big Brother since it’s proven immortal so far whereas its promoters at least die. The recent Unconstitutional Law passed by the House will be challenged if the Senate affirms it and Biden signs it, so students are right to continue to agitate against it. Continuing to aid a Genocide abets that and makes the abettor guilty of Genocide which is another point that must be made. Plus, what the ICJ and ICC have decided on the issue also needs to be aired since BigLie Media won’t. Those of us too old or too far removed from a university involved in such protests can still support them by contributing to their support organizations and by holding local support demonstrations. And with the protests going global, my many overseas subscribers can do the same. It ought to be clear we’re living in a Transformative Era aiming to preserve traditional civilization from one that’s clearly decivilizational and pushes a false reality aimed at convincing deluded liberals that theirs is the proper path.

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