Russia on Veto of its UNSC Humanitarian Resolution and Crooke's Latest

Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued this media notice today after its humanitarian UNSC resolution was vetoed by the usual suspects:

On October 16, the UN Security Council voted on Russia's draft resolution on a humanitarian ceasefire in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict zone, primarily in the Gaza Strip.

The document prescribed a number of specific urgent measures designed to stop the violence and suffering of civilians, free the hostages, prevent a humanitarian catastrophe approaching the enclave and avoid the spread of hostilities to other countries in the region. Given the extremely tense situation, it was imperative to act without delay. That is why the draft we presented did not contain political elements and assessments, references to one or another side of the conflict, which could complicate the process of its coordination. Almost 30 countries, including 17 states of the Arab world, became co-sponsors of the Russian initiative.

Despite this, the project was not adopted. The Western "troika" (the United States, Great Britain and France) opposed it, with Japan joining it. Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Malta and Switzerland abstained.

Thus, literally before the eyes of the participants of the meeting, as well as the entire international community, the UN Security Council, the main body for maintaining global peace and security, was unable to adopt a decision that would help stop the bloodshed, alleviate the terrible humanitarian consequences and create prerequisites for overcoming the current unprecedented crisis. No clear, strong and collective message was sent calling for an immediate, sustainable and respected humanitarian ceasefire. In general, for more than 10 days now, the UN Security Council has been unable to hold a full-fledged open meeting on the situation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict zone, nor to organise appropriate consultations between delegations and interested countries to determine further practical steps.

As yesterday's vote showed, it was the position of Washington and other Western capitals that prevented the adoption of a natural and logical decision, which in the current conditions is an absolute humanitarian imperative and a moral duty of all responsible members of the international community. At the same time, humanitarian considerations, the norms of international law, and the root causes of the unresolved Palestinian problem, which Moscow has been insistently pointing out in recent years, do not count….

[The casualty count is all muddled and is no longer accurate, so it was omitted.]

More than 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip were left without water, food, medical care, fuel and electricity. The only checkpoint on the border with Egypt, Rafah, was again hit by a missile and was never opened for civilians to leave and deliver humanitarian supplies. About 1000,<> Russian citizens, their family members and others who turned to us for help in evacuating became de facto hostages of the military blockade of Gaza.

All this is happening with the inaction of the UN Security Council, which is paralyzed, like the Middle East "quartet" of international mediators consisting of Russia, the United States, the EU and the UN, and in the narrow selfish interests of individual countries, whose unilateral actions have not only ended in complete failure, but have also led to a large-scale escalation of violence in the Middle East.

If it had passed, would it have prevented the Zionists from bombing the Al-Ahli al-Arab Hospital (also known as the Baptist Hospital) in Gaza killing close to a thousand? Perhaps, but we’ll never know. The number of War Crimes its committed already qualifies Zionist leaders for firing squads after they’re tried and convicted of course. From this item at The Cradle, it appears Biden wants to direct this war himself, what with Blinken sitting in on the Zionist’s War Cabinet. Abbas of the corrupt Palestinian Authority refused to meet Biden after the hospital crime, but his PA goons are busy beating up Palestinian protesters in the West Bank instead of joining them.

It’s currently night in Palestine or I’d include photos of the destroyed hospital. I recall the Outlaw US Empire bombing several in Syria, and then we had NATO doing the same in Yugoslavia then later in Serbia.

Alastair Crooke’s delayed al-Mayadeen column was published a few hours ago. Here it is in full, “A 1909 best-seller said war couldn’t happen -- then it did”:

In the pre-WW1 era, policy-makers (and markets too) ‘forged ahead’ -- blissfully ignoring the rising danger that was accreting during the sleepy summer hiatus between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the outbreak of the War, five weeks later. (Markets, historically, almost never have anticipated the outbreak of conflict correctly).

Some, of course, did understand that two heavily armed alliances were on a potential collision course. Opinion however (resonating with today’s consensus), had been heavily influenced by Norman Angell’s 1909 best-seller, The Great Illusion, arguing that war wouldn’t happen, because global trade and capital flows were too closely interlinked. 

Then it did.

In the wake of first, the US flight from Kabul; second, the collapse of the Ukraine offensive -- concurrently with the humiliation of NATO; and, third, the failure of Israeli Intelligence, plus the dismal Israeli military operational response to 7 October, observers claim to see the Empire fraying visibly.  

The mythic power shibboleths have revealed themselves as vapid. The sense of our standing at a major point of inflection is palpable -- Everything seems to be in a state of flux; all together; all at once.

This is both exciting, but worrying: Will events spiral out of control? Will war engulf us?

Clearly, the myth of the West as the ‘vision for all’ -- together, perhaps, with its defining substrata of reductive mechanical thinking -- has run its course. The rest of the world has ‘moved on’. 

Some passionately will wish to extend ‘the present’. Many more, however, are deeply disaffected with the present, and want it radically altered (or even smashed) -- and all wonder what may be coming next.

We also live under the heavy yoke of the accumulated debris from three long centuries of millenarian, utopian projects -- all of which had seemed to promise, at first, a ‘new world’, but ultimately ended with intolerant violent coercion, deception, and millions dead.  The delusion from this legacy is heavy.

In Joseph Koerner’s 2004 The Reformation of the Image, the author suggests that ‘the rejection of symbolic meaning (the destruction of statues and pictures)’ during the European Reformation reflected a hatred based on an absolute command that there must be an unambiguous distinction between truth and falsehood -- a ‘with us, or against us’ insistence that developed into the consequent inability to hear or accept the implicit or metaphorical, in discourse.  

And because of a fear of the power of imagination, symbols were to become objects of terror. The deep insecurity of the times was demanding authenticity, literal truth, and singleness of meaning. 

The toppling of statues in our era too is a rejuvenescence of deep Western insecurity: An insecurity aggravated by the rejection of the Western universalist myth, and secondly, by the widespread ‘eternal return’ to civilizational states bringing distinct ways of ‘seeing’ and thinking. 

Many old ‘civilization states’ use and understand implicit and symbolic meaning very well. The metamorphosis away from the ‘radical sceptic’-drenched ratiocination of the Western ‘with us, or against us’ will constitute one of the big changes for the future.

The Western insistence on the absolute distinction between truth and falsehood/misinformation will increase as the situation tetters on the edge. It will not be for the first time. 

On the last day of the carnival in Florence in 1497, a huge pyramidal flight of stairs was built in the Piazza della Signoria. It was stacked from the bottom step upwards with the carnival paraphernalia: masks and carnival disguises. Then heaped upon the pile, were the manuscripts of Latin and Italian poets. Women’s ornaments were next, and crowning the flaming tower were paintings of both mythic and actual, female beauties and ancient sculptures of female heads.

Having burnt out the image, the new European mindset then set about closing itself off and shutting down in a very absolute, almost irreversible way, all the sources of tradition, which were of course, nothing less than the sources of Western culture -- as well as those of Islamic culture.

As that early repression of  ‘incorrect thinking’ took hold, John Dee, Elizabeth I’s confident, considered to be the greatest philosopher in England, died lonely, and destitute, vilified and attacked by an angry mob -- his great library ransacked. And Giordano Bruno, the great Hermetic ‘thinker’ of his age, endured eight years of torture during which he refused to recant before, in 1600, being led out into the Piazza di Fiori (Square of Flowers), in Rome, and ceremonially burnt alive.

Hopefully, the aftermath of our present inflection point will not be so traumatic -- but don’t count on it. Instead of culture being the site of revolutionary action against an élite (per Gramsci), US social net platforms, cleansed of non-western rivals, become precisely the site where the system reasserts itself,  and neuters the possibility of political resistance. 

What will the dissolution of the Western ‘project’ mean in other ways?  It could result in an up-and-down complete scission into two spheres: a Western bloc and a BRICS bloc, locking horns in a new Cold War; but more likely, we will see horizontal escalation across multiple dimensions.

The West is weakening most notably in the economic sphere: In the post-war period, it enjoyed prosperity. Easy money, easy decisions; Problems? Kick the can down the road. But US government debt has built up and become exponential (accumulating at circa $1 trillion/month). Financial products have replaced manufacturing across the Western sphere.

The difficulties that an overindebted economy (even one that can ‘print’ its own money) will encounter from rising interest rates range far and wide. At the same time, the BRICS are quietly stepping into the earlier Western (imperial) business model: i.e. the control over commodities, and an increasing grip on key maritime waterways and choke points. 

The more overstretched -- financially or geo-politically -- the Empire becomes, the more horizontal crises will flare up, with financial and tech ‘artillery exchanges’ predominating.  

What was not understood in that earlier moment of mid-1914 (the Sarajevo moment) was that it seemed then somehow propitious for Germany to aspire to Great Power status and empire -- and, equally plausible, that Britain would believe that it could quash it utterly.  

Just as today Team Biden seems convinced that the US can use its financial and trade muscle – whilst America still predominates - to crush China’s rise, contain Russia, and arm-twist Europe into tech vassalage. 

"We're the United States of America, for God's sake. We're the most powerful nation in the history of the world. We can take care both of these [Ukraine and Israel] and still maintain our overall international defence", Biden said on 60 Minutes. 

In the early twentieth century, Britain’s attempt to rip apart global supply lines to preserve its own, and to deny Germany its external links, effectively channeled resurgent German ambitions eastwards, across the plain of Europe, and ultimately, to a war on Russia (as Germany coveted a slice of Asia for its putative empire).  It ended with war and economic depression.

Today, a weakened US and Europe are driving the Chinese and Russian vision eastwards. The latter are not building an empire. They are building a BRICS that effectively completes the nineteenth-century paradigm by assimilating Asia and Africa into a separate Heartland sphere.

It seems unfinished. The problem is the conflicts are in the heart of the Heartland. Empire must be ejected for the BRICS+ project to be consummated. With events in Palestine and the signaled promise of escalation, how far will the war widen? I note Crooke hasn’t committed to saying war is immanent, although I have. It seemed the one last chance was vetoed by the Empire as if to say “we’ll solve this our way.” The continued abetting of Genocide seems to be a regular feature of the Outlaw US Empire going back to its birth as a series of colonies.

Putin and Xi are in Beijing along with many heads-of-state for the Belt & Road Forum celebrating the 10th anniversary of BRI’s announcement. Will a statement be issued? Will they have a joint presser? Or will they stay silent, which seems very unlikely, as the conflict escalates? Crooke’s recitation of history provides a very hard lesson in knowing history as well as possible. The incidents around 1600 were all spawned by the Papal Bulls of 100-130 years prior that reignited the Age of Plunder which had gone into hibernation after the Crusades that began that Age. The Global Majority needs to work on its own unilateral international monetary and trade systems while the conflict occurs in hopes the world will emerge whole when it ends and the new systems can begin working. Recall Bretton Woods and Versailles were very much unilateral decisions, and as Crooke noted, at the end of both world wars and the revolt that spawned the Zionists in Palestine no formal working agreements were made, which allowed further conflicts to occur. If we do get another chance, we must make certain there are no loose ends, that Pandora’s box gets securely closed and sealed tight.

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