Crooke on Ukraine, Gaza & the Imperial Narrative's Demise

Cover photo for Their Goes the Neighborhood and its hit “A Life of Illusion.”

Alastair Crooke’s newest SCF essay IMO must be read prior to his talk with Judge Napolitano as the context from the first feeds that of the second. A third piece perhaps ought to be read prior to all as Crooke cites it at the outset, Simplicius’s “Bones of Tomorrow,” all of which add up to about an hours-worth of time.

Having said all that, here’s Crooke’s SCF essay in full so there’s some separation between the above and what I’ll write about it all below.

A strange ennui and distracted attention envelops the West today.

Hat-tip to Simplicius’ Bones of Tomorrow, in which he reflects on a Culture that has become debased; its lures that used to trap us into the ‘Myth of the West’ lie withered, as patently false idols. The dimming fire has squandered any sense of ‘magic’ in the guttering West, or indeed of hope to recoup this something ‘lost’. It is the wistful realisation that – as it stands – the myth is never likely to offer anything of lasting value again.

The figments of a utopian future once promised, nonetheless continue their seductive hold on our psyche, but only on attention-hopping, hypnotic touch-screens. Cultural touchstones crumble around us like rotting edifices one after another. Yet, we are too distracted to take real notice, or to absorb the significance. Counter ‘currents’ in the shadows gleefully applaud.

Where we stand now is where we’ve always stood – in the quicksands of time. A passing of the guard; one world fading, deep into the slow, declining burnout phase, the natural process of decay and renewal, whilst taking us forward towards some next, still-to-sprout, green shoots. A sense of something lost and never to be found again, which we all endure these days.

The ‘Elect’ though, have deliberately raised the stakes. They do not want to ‘let go’. They have determined that, with the western train wrecked on its own cultural ‘wall’, the ‘End of Time’ story of convergence on a common future is ‘over’ too.

And along with it, the claimed western mandate to dictate the ‘direction forward’ is over also.

Beneath the gimcrack and baubled veneer, the western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, that superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have been transmitted down the ages so that those in the West today, are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA” has transpired to be nothing more than the faded tinselry of hollow narrative.

This is the deep fear of western political leaders – they know the ‘Narrative’ to be a fiction. Nonetheless, they go on telling it to themselves, despite knowing that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth. Absent the Myth, they sense, the western project, and western prosperity, could disintegrate utterly.

The ‘Elect’ hoped that the dredged-up, chimeric dreams of material prosperity and western savoir faire could still prop the Myth ‘aloft’, but only (and only if) the West possessed the better narrative. The right narrative was everything. It had to outmatch and outshine the ‘clunky narratives’ of adversaries. This deceptive covenant had to endure at all costs, lest the baubled veneer of the Myth come undone.

So the narrative ‘factory’ is put hard to work. The kinetic war in Ukraine is settled in an evident and overwhelming Russian victory – albeit without it yet being ‘over’. Of course not: Ukraine was but one single battlescape in the wider struggle to force the ‘Rimland’ (the Atlanticist world) to accept an agreed upon frontier between it and the ‘Heartland’ (Russia, China and their Asian depth), and gracefully to renounce its claim to exceptionality in determining our global future.

The MSM media therefore is abuzz with analysis of how to define a ‘western win’: Is it possible to ‘flip’ the narrative of Ukraine, they ponder, to being ‘another’ western win? They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.

Call the Ukraine conflict a ‘stalemate’, and insist that it represents a ‘defeat’ for Putin and a ‘win’ for Biden, since Russia was unable to seize the whole of Ukraine (falsely imputing this to have been Moscow’s objective, from the start). This approach is thought rather ‘cool’ by western analysts: Frame the narrative of a ‘win’ and ensure that from top-to-bottom of society, all adhere to the correct narrative without demur.

But this is little more than a simple projection from the YouTube ‘influencer’ culture, by which random individuals earn ‘street cred’, (and lots of cash), by curating slick narratives – whether about fashion, or political events. It may work insofar as the addled western public is concerned, but it has limited traction beyond western cultural tinselry.

The flaw when ‘flip-narratives’ are weaponised geo-politically, however, is that propaganda which is so divorced from a reality that is evident simply is not a winning narrative (except in the most fleeting of ways). Plainly said, it leads to the self-isolation of its authors.

The glee with which evident western ‘reverses’ seemingly can be narratively ‘flipped’ by Intelligence ‘leaks’ propagating rank lies to support a narrative has become a contagion amongst western intelligence services. Yet rather, this ‘deceptive covenant’ is a poisoned chalice.

If the West had any remaining sense, it would concentrate more on setting a ‘narrative of western defeat’ in Ukraine, rather than promulgating yet another rotting ‘narrative of victory’.

Why so?

Because a wise leadership would be preparing its people for defeat. Unlikely and false stories of glory on the battlefield come back to bite the perpetrators, as (metaphorically) the wounded and dead return to contradict visibly the tale of victory.

The West, by contrast, is still fed on stories of western leadership, election, innate qualities and exceptionalism. Put simply, this ‘influencer’ fad signally is failing to help westerners cope with the tectonic shifts occurring across the globe. Its peoples are wholly unprepared for the ‘Winter that is Coming’.

Yet, the purveyors of ‘winning’ hug themselves in sheer glee as their ‘flipped’ delusions are relayed through a compliant MSM.

Childish propaganda and lying however will only serve to make the new era all the more painful. A ‘narrative of defeat’, told with integrity, by contrast, is one that helps a people to understand how a particular crisis arose and came to afflict them. It should also signal a way forward. In Iran this was understood: ‘Ashura’ gave the key to understanding the pain and crisis Iranians had been enduring, and the Mahdi signalled a future that lay beyond immediate crisis.

The need for a return to an integrity of messaging is all the more pressing as attempts to repair one reversal, with a false narrative – inverting realities to achieve the putative ‘win’ – will only lead to further losses.

Deceit is exposed in the instant. Trust takes a decade to build. Does the West really believe it can recoup in this way? Nobody beyond their authors believes these western Intelligence narratives, post- Ukraine. They are now tainted for the long run. In the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle.

There is another factor at play here too. EU spokesman on foreign affairs, Peter Stano, when asked this month by TASS about the Ukrainian missile strikes on the Russian city of Belgorod, resulting in over two dozen civilian casualties, said: “Regarding the specific incident in Belgorod, no information that comes from Russia can be considered trustworthy”, the spokesman added, accusing Moscow of “constant lies, manipulation and propaganda”.

Here lies the dark underside to ‘Win Narratives’ that become unyoked from the facts on the ground: The EU spokesman is compelled to affirm the mandatory narrative of Ukraine’s “right to defend itself … from aggression” – but then to nix anything and everything that Russia may say.

Put plainly, ‘win narratives’ kill empathy; they kill active listening and understanding. Diplomats are supposed to practice deep listening. If what they hear jars with what they expect, or want to hear, they are supposed to listen harder, and try to run-down what it is that lies out-of-sight, behind what they hear, so to understand what was intended, and to better understand their interlocutor. The West does not practice this now.

People often ask why is there so little empathy evident today? Why do states talk past each other? Why are channels of communication jammed? Well, that’s why: Flipped narratives based on easily exposed untruths.

Yet the western defeat in Ukraine may be but one part to an accumulation of western ‘defeats’. Defeat in Israel, for one, would strike at the very core of U.S. political being – too close to the quick to be lightly brushed aside. And there may be more hurts to come in the Middle East.

Just to be clear: the spinning of a fabric of delusion, unfaithful to the granular truth lurking beneath, ultimately hurts its authors. It leaves people disorientated, insecure, kicking at the loose gravel of the past, rummaging for some understanding of the crashing defeat, for which they are wholly unprepared.

The risk is then of a nation being swept off-course to ultimate catastrophe by the romance of ‘winning’ slogans such as ‘together we will win’ (heard all across Israel today): “Anyone who has studied German history and watched Goebbels’ career, sees what a dangerous instrument propaganda is – one that can lead to a [catastrophic] national loss of way.” [Bolded italics My Emphasis]

How many readers started humming the Joe Walsh tune, “A Life of Illusion,” perhaps prompted by the opening image?

Sometimes, I can't help but feeling that I'm
Living a life of illusion
And oh, why can't we let it be
And see through the hole in this wall of confusion
I just can't help but feeling I'm living a life of Illusion

Pow, right between the eyes
Oh how nature loves her little surprises
Wow, it all seems so logical now
It's just one of her better disguises
And it comes with no warning, nature loves her little surprises
Continual crisis

Hey, don't you know it's a waste of your day
Caught up in endless solutions
That have no meaning
Just another hunch, based upon jumping conclusions
Backed up against a wall of confusion
Caught up in endless solutions
Living a life of illusion

That was from 1981 as a new narrative was being fed to Americans—Greed is Good—and the “endless solutions“ of continually kicking the can down the road. That road has led into a box canyon with walls far too high and steep to scale, thus the only way out is via the way in. But that narrative won’t sell, as to explain it all is to tell the truth about what’s happened since 1942, or perhaps 1913, at least in the United States. But only in the West are the days gloomy and the future seemingly dreadful. The Global Majority is very busy creating its own version of the modern world without the strife inflicted by the old, although its talons still try to retain its grip.

The Zionists are at each other’s necks as their Project lies in tatters thanks to the lies—some very old, some new—that underline it. A great mass of Occupied Palestine’s populace is just as hair-tearing as their narratives smashed into the Al-Aqsa Flood that completed the picture for the world of them as Genocidal Maniacs. And combined with the Ukraine debacle, the Big Picture is now almost complete enough for the Global Majority to see just how ugly and depraved the West is, along with some of their own governments. Again, the non-state actors will be the ones who provide the force to alter the situation’s chemistry—for if Zionists don’t want to live next to Palestinians, Lebanese, or other Arabs and Christians, then they will need to find somewhere else to live with their Anti-Semitism and other prejudices; but that will be difficult having revealed their true nature.

Dr. Hudon’s end-of-year predictions interview forecast several possibilities that reiterate some of his previous analyses. He and I agree that the world will be bifurcated into two geopolitical/geoeconomic blocs, essentially the NATO Bloc and the RoW Bloc. The Neoliberals currently ruining the West will remain in charge until they get ousted. Will the twin defeats in Palestine and Ukraine be enough? Perhaps for the EU but not for NATO for that’s the tool the Outlaw US Empire uses to control its newly acquired European colonies. To liberate themselves, Europeans must oust both NATO and the EU to regain their independence, something not seen in Europe for centuries. What liberating elixir will work for the USA is currently unclear aside from the fact that it cannot consist of the current political frame and perhaps even its institutions. Like Europe, Americans have never really been liberated either so they can be allowed to improve their Union as their Constitution mandates.

I’ll conclude by posting the comment I made in response to Simplicius’s essay:

Need to thank Alastair Crooke for citing your essay in his current SCF essay. Much to ponder, but I must admit to enjoying the world and Humanity's evolution to a higher moral plane as the paradigm shifts. Being familiar with Geologic Time and Humanity's infancy within that context, I believe the best is yet to come, but to get there the 2000+ year-old false narratives of various sorts must be cast off so Truth can become a guide. I look at the greater partnership between SCO, BRICS+, ASEAN, African Union, and their kin and the Enlightenment they contain, an Enlightenment that was proposed by the West then immediately snuffed out with the arrival of the UN and its immediate abandonment by what would become the Outlaw US Empire. I'll bet Muscovites have the same sense of wonder as that expressed by the author of your first citation, as do Chinese and numerus other peoples of the Global Majority. Thanks goodness the West isn't all there is. I don't know what the young man said during the after-dinner conversation with Putin and the families who lost a member in the SMO prior to going to the Christmas service, but he was clearly animated and full of wonder that lightened up that entire room. Putin talks about the many opportunities awaiting youth when he talks with them. Hudson said much the same at the end of his new year predictions interview with Ania. As a Jazz fan, I know there's always another way to arrange something that's old but remains beautiful, recharges it with vitality so it takes on a life of its own.

Yes, it may seem dark before the dawn; but, that dawn will come and conquer the darkness.

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