geopolitics – One Thousand And One Parsecs

The key to understanding the Middle East (and possibly the world)

I just finished Douglass Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults, and wow, is it an incredible book. Difficult to read, simply because of the grim nature of the subject, but a very powerful and very timely book.

My own thinking on Israel and the Middle East has changed a lot since the October 7th attacks. For the record, I studied Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic in college in the 00s, traveled throughout Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and Palestine / Judea & Samaria while I was pursuing my degree. I’ve kept up with geopolitical developments over the years, including during the Arab spring, and have helped some of my Arab friends navigate those developments.

The apocryphal Churchill quote that “if you’re not a liberal by your 20s, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by your 50s, you have no brain” very much describes my own experience. I used to be very sympathetic toward the Palestinians, but after the October 7th attacks, my position has shifted almost 180 degrees.

The thing about the Middle East is that even though it’s complex, it’s not really that complicated. Within the Middle East, there are basically three kinds of people:

the Jews,
the people who want to kill the Jews, and
the people who really don’t care.

This dynamic has defined the politics of the region since at least the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 600 BC, and possibly quite longer. Possibly, in fact, since the very first Hebrews migrated to the region during the Bronze Age Collapse.

(As a side note, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant since our first historical records of the Jews. In other words, this is the one place in the world where the Jews are indigenous. Therefore, anyone who argues that the Jewish State of Israel is a “colonist” state is, in effect, arguing for the extermination of the Jews, because there is no other place in the world where the Jews can live and not be considered colonists. At the very least, they are laying the foundation for the ideological position that the Jews should always and everywhere be treated as subhuman.)

With the above dymanic in mind, there are only two configurations that possess any sort of inherent stability. The first is that the Jews are the people in charge of the region AND constitute the majority of the population. That way, even if all of the non-Jews fall into the kill-the-Jews camp, they are still not powerful enough to carry out their plans.

This was the state of affairs from the days of Ezra and Nehemiah basically to the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Following the Babylonian exile, the Jews returned to their homeland under the (mostly) benevolent rule of King Darius of Persia, who allowed them to rebuild the temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed. When Alexander took over the region and the Greeks began to Hellenize it, the Maccabees and other Jewish rulers still managed to hold their own.

But all of that changed when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. They put down the Jewish revolt with utter ruthlessness, making a desert and calling it peace. They drove the main body of the Jews out of their ancestral homeland, making sure it would never be such a hotbed of rebellion again. They also renamed the region “Palestine,” after the ancestral enemies of the Jews, the Phillistines. The name “Palestine” was originally an insult to the conquered Jewish people, just like the name “Britain” (ie “land of the painted people”) was originally an insult to the conquered Celts. And just like the British came to own the term, the Jews also came to own the term “Palestine” until it was appropriated from them by the Levantine Arabs who wanted to kill all the Jews.

From 70 A.D. until the early 20th century, the Jews were a minority in their own homeland. And so long as their numbers didn’t get too large, things were relatively stable. Sure, there were plenty of people who still wanted to kill them all, but so long as the Jews mostly stayed out of sight, most of the non-Jews frankly didn’t care. It was only when their numbers began to grow that the I-don’t-care faction bled into the kill-them-all faction, leading to pogroms and mass rapes and all sorts of insane atrocities.

But then, in the 19th century, the Jews began to migrate back to the region in large numbers. This led to an inherently unstable configuration which persists to this day, where the Jews and non-Jews are roughly equal in number. The Jews formed the State of Israel with help from their Western patrons, who provided a degree of metastability. But the situation is not long-term stable, and hasn’t been for the last 150 years.

The Americans tried to solve this problem by bringing together the Jews and the people who want to kill the Jews—as if they could ever make peace. This was incredibly naive. So long as there are Jews, there will be people who want to kill them. Individuals may be persuaded to change their positions, but the ideologies of antisemitism are as persistent as the Jewish people themselves. The death cult will never be satisfied until all of the Jews are dead.

What October 7th showed us is that the three-way dynamic of the region is still very much in play, and that the kill-the-Jews faction is still far too strong. And given the way things are changing here in the United States, I suspect that the Jews have, at best, another generation before their Western patrons become unreliable, and the metastable nature of the current configuration begins to deteriorate.

The Abraham Accords are changing things in a very positive way. For once, instead of trying to get the Jews to make a deal with the people who want to kill them, we are moving away from that silly nonsense and cutting those people out of the equation by making a deal with everyone else (like we should have done in the beginning). And with the way that Iran was utterly defeated in the latest war, it looks like that might actually work. But even then I don’t think the situation is going to be long-term stable unless it ultimately leads to a mass resettlement of the Palestinians, because that’s the only thing (aside from the senseless massacre of millions of Israeli Jews) that puts us into a stable configuration.

I think the Israelis know this. And I think that Israel is going to get a lot more aggressive in the coming years, much to the consternation and perplexity of their friends here in the West who do not understand this three-way dynamic (or who think that the key to peace is for the Jews to play nice and not fight back, so that most of the non-Jews fall into the I-don’t-care camp).

Because here’s the thing that almost no one is talking about: the impetus for the October 7th massacre was the transportation of several red heifers to Israel from a ranch in Texas. In order to build the third Jewish temple, the land of the Temple Mount (where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stand) needs to be ritually cleansed by the ashes of a pure red heifer. The reason Hamas called their operation the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was to appeal to their Muslim brothers to defend the temple mount.

From what I understand, most Jews do not currently want to rebuild the temple, and the State of Israel itself has taken strong measures to suppress those who do. But every time the Jews have had a commanding presence in their own ancestral homeland, they have built or maintained a temple on the Temple Mount. So once they feel they’re strong enough, they will probably do it again. And when that happens (or as it is beginning to happen, perhaps even now), I think that this three-way dynamic will become much more of a global phenomenon.

My thoughts on the Trump assassination attempt

There was a second shooter, probably on the water tower. The first shooter, who was identified and killed by the counter-snipers, was obviously a fall-guy, with the second shooter on scene as insurance in case the first guy failed.

I don’t think the Secret Service agents on the scene were in on the plot. They demonstrated some glaring incompetence, but that’s actually become quite typical of the agency in recent years.

The reason the counter-snipers didn’t fire first was probably because there were trees obscuring their view. I don’t think they were in on the plot. However, the fact that they were positioned where they were is all kinds of suspicious, since it gave the first shooter a perfect position—and who put the counter-snipers on that roof in the first place? They should have been on the water tower, which commanded the whole area.

The first shooter could not have gotten into position without some kind of inside help. The level of official incompetence that it would take to allow him to get into position the way he did approaches the level of an Epstein suicide. He was on the freaking roof of the temporary police headquarters, for crying out loud—he had to cross a parking lot full of police cars to get to the effing ladder!

Kim Cheatle absolutely needs to take responsibility and resign as head of the Secret Service. The fact that she hasn’t tells me that she wants to hang on to power long enough to cover up her complicity.

I have zero faith in the FBI and expect them to use the “investigation” to cover up the truth and destroy evidence. Within a month, most of this stuff is likely going to be memory-holed by Google and all the other big tech companies. Take note.

However, with everything that has happened since the failed assassination, I am actually quite hopeful. Trump is demonstrating incredible leadership, and appears to be changing his message to a genuine call for unity. From what I can tell, this brush with death has deeply changed him.

Also, the Right is tremendously unified right now, to the point where I would be surprised if the people who plotted to take his life make another attempt. If the would-be assassins are indeed with the deep state / intelligence agencies (which makes sense, since a second-term Trump administration represents an existential threat to their power), then they’ve got to see that making him a martyr will blow up in their faces, especially now.

However, I could be wrong, especially if one of the goals of the would-be assassins is to blow up the country and drive us into a hot civil war. But who would that actually benefit, besides a foreign power? A post-Trump America would become totally ungovernable, even dangerously anarchic, if Trump were to become a martyr at this point.

The way the establishment appears to be in total disarray tells me that they are in retreat and making this sort of calculation right now. They will probably throw the Secret Service under the bus and do everything they can to hide just how far up the food chain this assassination plot really goes.

If Trump survives to November and the election is allowed to proceed, Trump will almost certainly become the 47th president. Since he represents an existential threat to the people currently in power, I think there’s a high likelihood that some sort of “crisis” will emerge that gives them an excuse to cancel the election. It could be a second pandemic. It could be a global war. It could be an October 7th-style terrorist attack on American soil. All of these are possibilities.

However, if none of this occurs and we somehow manage to get to November without a major crisis, I expect the people in power to do everything they can to plant some poison pills for the second Trump administration, in order to tie his hands. The most obvious of these would be to incite a direct military conflict between the US and Russia. It wouldn’t be easy for Trump to disentangle us from the Russia-Ukraine proxy war we’re currently fighting, but he could probably still do it. However, if the bombs are already flying between the US and Russia when he comes in on day 1, then the Neocons get the war they so desperately want, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

Assuming that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is still functional, the world has never been closer to a global nuclear war than it is right now—and with every second that passes, the likelihood only grows. It will probably take divine intervention to prevent that from happening between now and November, but we’ve already seen divine intervention in the fact that Trump is still with us. Which is not to make him out to be Jesus—if anything, he’s an American Samson—but it’s only by the grace of God that he is still alive.

Interesting times indeed.

The best take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I’ve heard

This is, by far, the best take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I’ve heard. It’s between a Jew and a Palestinian, but both of them are converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which means that they’re less interested in winning a debate and more interested in coming to a common understanding, even though they are approaching it from completely opposite sides. It also means that they’re willing to say things that the hardliners on both sides of the conflict would consider heretical, and own up to their own side’s mistakes and shortcomings. Really fascinating stuff, with none of the bloviating lies, manipulative gaslighting, or emotional hyperbole that characterizes so much coverage of the conflict these days. You’ll probably get more out of it if you’re a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but even if you’re not, I highly recommend giving it a listen.

How the Israeli-Hamas war will likely turn into WWIII before Christmas

The purpose of this post is not to pick any particular side or advocate for any particular action, but to give a back-of-the-napkin analysis of the current situation on the ground in the Middle East and project where it will likely go in the coming days and weeks. My goal is to approach the geopolitics of this conflict from a realist perspective and not let my own biases led to “wishcasting” or “doomcasting,” but these are just my own opinions, and I don’t have any special knowledge of the situation: just what I’ve been following from open source newscasts and political pundits.

What authority do I have to speak on this subject, besides just being a guy on the internet? In 2010, I double-majored in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from BYU, but please don’t hold that against me: I’ve since come to realize that most of what I learned in university is a lie, either of commission through the Islamic principle of taqiyya which states that it is morally virtuous for a muslim to lie to a kafir in the service of Islam (and guess where we kafirs have learned everything we think to know about Islam), or a lie of ommission, perpetuated by things like the history of anti-semitism that the American academic establishment studiously chooses to ignore. I also speak and read Arabic, spent a summer living, traveling, and hitchhiking in the Middle East, had two Palestinian roommates in college, and briefly interned as a research assistant in a major K-street foreign policy think tank, though I was fired early for having moral principles.

I’m going to assume that the reader is familiar with the basic history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the events of the past week. The situation on the ground is changing quickly, and the fog of war is certainly beginning to thicken, but my understanding of it is as follows:

Israel is mobilizing an army of several hundred thousand soldiers for a ground invasion of Gaza, while the Israeli air force is striking suspected Hamas targets throughout the Gaza strip. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to launch several hundred missiles per day at Israeli targets, though it appears to be rationing munitions as it prepares for a protracted conflict.

With that said, Hamas is clearly targeting civilians while using their own people as human shields, whereas Israel is targeting Hamas while evacuating civilians from staging areas such as Sderot. That’s an important distinction, not only for moral clarity, but for the war for global public opinion, which is currently the most important aspect of this conflict.

Israel’s five war goals, as stated by PM Netenyaho, are: 1) defeat any terrorists remaining in Israel, 2) launch a massive offensive operation, 3) contain the conflict to Gaza, 4) expand support in the international community, and 5) solidify national unity.

Goal 1 has mostly been achieved, though there are still sporadic reports of gunfights with isloated Hamas terrorists still on Israeli soil. However, the border fence has been secured, and so far as I can tell, no new terrorists are crossing over.

Goal 2 is currently pending. The airstrikes are brutal and ongoing, but the real offensive is going to begin with the ground offensive, which is clearly with days or even hours of beginning. In fact, it may have already begun.

Goal 3 is much more tricky. Hezbollah in the north is reported to have 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel, and has issued statements of solidarity with Hamas. Some skirmishes and artillery exchanges on the northern border have already occured. In addition, Israeli forces have exchanged fire with Syrian forces across the Golan Heights, and just this morning, Israel struck the Damascus airport, preventing a shipment of Iranian arms from entering the conflict zone.

So it seems very unlikely that Israel will achieve goal 3, especially since Hamas’s primary objective right now is likely to draw in other elements from the Arab world. They’re already calling for a general jihad, so it would not surprise me if we see a major escalation across Israel’s other borders. It’s not a question of if, but when.

As for goals 4 and 5, Israel currently appears to be experiencing a level of success that I have not seen since I started studying this conflict. The sheer savagery with which Hamas has raped and murdered women and children has, I believe, strongly shifted sympathies in the West toward Israel. Also, unity among Israelis has also never been higher, by all appearances exceeding the unity I saw here in the US in the days after the 9/11 attacks. However, the situation is very dynamic, and changing by the hour. As the shock and horror of Hamas’s atrocities passes out of the news cycle, I expect that most people in the West will either revert to their prior opinions, or put the conflict out of mind.

In the Arab world, however, I suspect that it’s just the opposite. What Hamas lost in terms of public relations with the west, they have probably gained with most Arabs. Anti-semitism runs deep throughout the entire Arab world, and the proportion of Arabs who view Jews as non-people is probably as high or higher than the proportion of Germans who did so in the years leading up to WWII. But the blow to Israel’s reputation for invincibility has now been shattered by Hamas, which now makes this conflict an existential one for both parties. If Hamas survives the conflict with any capability to prosecute terrorist attacks, that reputation will be permanently shattered, inspiring thousands of other Arabs to take up arms until Israel dies by a thousand cuts. Therefore, Israel must eradicate Hamas completely before the war expands to other fronts, and the tide of global opinion turns against Israel as images of dead and wounded Palestinians drowns out the images we’ve already seen of raped and murdered Israelis.

I suspect that Hezbollah is waiting until Israel commits itself to a ground offensive in Gaza before they open a second front in the north. That will be the time when Israel is weakest, especially if they’ve already spent most of their munitions on Gaza. That’s probably why Israel hasn’t launched the ground offensive already. Will Israel launch a pre-emptive strike against southern Lebanon, the way they did against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the ’67 war? The biggest risks with that are 1) a failure or partial success that commits too many forces to the north, before Hamas has been sufficiently defeated, and 2) losing the public relations battle, which is already guaranteed to happen eventually, given the steps they must take with the ground invasion of Gaza.

When—not if, but when—the northern front to this war opens up, Syria and Lebanon will almost certainly be drawn into the conflict. Jordan and Egypt will likely try to stay out of it for as long as they can, since among the Arab states, they are more closely aligned with the West than they are with Iran. Until this summer, Saudi Arabia was also aligned against Iran, but that began to shift when both countries joined the BRICS alliance. Saudi Arabia has also been making overtures with China, who appears to be siding tacitly with the Palestinians against NATO and the West.

Will Iran be drawn into this conflict? If it becomes protracted, almost certainly yes. I suspect they will enter it by launching a surprise attack on a US aircraft carrier, either with a drone, or with a Russian hypersonic missile. If they can sink a US aircraft carrier, that would be a major blow to our own military reputation, which would represent a tremendous victory in itself. Based on what we’ve seen in Ukraine about the effectiveness of drones in modern warfare, our Cold War-era aircraft carriers could prove to be as big of a liability as the Maginot Line, when the history of WWIII is written. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The way to prevent Iran from being drawn into this conflict is to eradicate Hamas swiftly and completely, bringing the war to a decisive close before the Iranians have fully mobilized. But Hamas is deeply entrenched, having used the billions of dollars of foreign aid they’ve received over the years to prepare for exactly this eventuality. So the Gaza offensive is like to strike fast and hard, without much regard for civilians such as we’ve seen from Israel in the past. Because of how this will shock global opinion, Israel has only a narrow window in which to carry it out.

In other words, this Hamas-Israel war is not likely to turn into a long, drawn out war of attrition, such as we’ve seen the Russo-Ukrainian war become. It’s also not likely to become a frozen conflict anytime soon. As for a ceasefire, that’s just not in the cards; the stakes for both sides are too existential, and the window in which Israel has to act is just too narrow. It’s going to be brutal.

But here’s the problem from the American perspective: our economy is so strained, and our fuel and weapons stockpiles are already so depleted that if we send too much military aid to Israel, we risk giving China an opening to attempt an invasion of Taiwan. If we don’t aid Israel, however, and that northern front opens up before Israel has eliminated Hamas, then the odds of this spiraling into a regional war begin to approach 100%. We can try to deter Iran by sending in more aircraft carriers, but to what degree have those military platforms become liabilities instead of assets, given how technology has changed the nature of war? It only took about a dozen well-placed bombs to sink four of Japan’s aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway. How many cheap Iranian drones will it take to sink one of ours? But if we take the neocon path, that opens up China to take Taiwan, or Russia to bleed us out in Ukraine and precipitate the collapse of NATO, which appears to be their ultimate goal.

And then there’s the situation on our southern border, which has been completely overrun. How many terrorist cells have already come over, and become embedded in our territory? How many of them will be activated if the Israeli-Hamas war expands, as it almost certainly will? Will a Hamas-style terrorist attack on American soil strengthen our resolve, or shatter it?

Given these realities, I’m having a hard time seeing how we avoid WWIII—if indeed, it hasn’t broken out already. The battle lines will probably be drawn between US/NATO and the BRICS alliance, since the financial/economic divisions appear to be aligned with the geopolitical ones. And with all the financial and geopolitical blunders we’ve made since the pandemic, it appears that we’ve set ourselves up for exactly this scenario. Seriously—if I’d written all this as a novel, with our southern border overrun, our strategic petroleum reserves depleted, our shamefully disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, a hot proxy war with Russia depleting our military reserves, and the botched pandemic response and lockdowns driving massive inflation and a supply chain collapse, it would have rightfully been panned as a trash. And yet, this is the clown world we currently find ourselves in.

Before WWIII goes nuclear, I expect it will go cyber. I have no idea what that will look like, but it’s probably best to prepare for extended power blackouts and loss of basic infrastructure. Also, if I were China or Russia, when this conflict does go nuclear I would strike the US with a barrage of high altitude EMPs and watch the Americans eat each other. That would certainly force the troops to go home.

How do we prevent any of these scenarios from unfolding? The only way that I can see is for Israel to destroy Hamas before Christmas—but even that isn’t a guarantee, if we become so overextended that China decides to take Taiwan as a result. So if WWIII hasn’t indeed already started, I think we will almost certainly be in WWIII before Christmas.

If you’re smarter than me, please tell me how I’m wrong.

Define “woke.”

Woke (WOHK): Adjective

Of or pertaining to the mass formation psychosis currently gripping the United States and most of the developed world. This mass formation psychosis is led by radical leftist ideologues and driven by social media addiction. Due to the collusion between major technology companies and the US government, there is also an element of state-sponsored propaganda and control.

The mass began to form in the late 2000s with the popularization of social media. As these technologies began to replace face-to-face human reactions, it created the pre-conditions of social isolation and free floating anxiety, in large part due to the addictive nature of the algorithms which promoted content most likely to induce outrage and anger in the end-user (see CGP Grey, “This Video Will Make You Angry”). Once these pre-conditions were in place, all that was necessary to create the psychosis was a target or series of events to focus the attention of the mass.

The 2010s were characterized by several of these focusing events, starting in 2012 with the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and continuing with numerous mass shootings such as Orlando and Sandy Hook, several landmark Supreme Court decisions on gay rights such as United States V. Windsor and Obergerfel v. Hodges, and the rise of such controversial movements as Gamergate and the Sad/Rabid Puppies. The culminating event in the creation of this mass formation psychosis was the election in 2016 of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.

Following Trump’s election, rogue elements of the bureaucracy, the administrative agencies, and the intelligence community (colloquially referred to as the “deep state”) successfully exploited this mass formation psychosis in an effort to hamstring the Trump administration and ultimately remove him from power. These deep state actors acted in collusion with the Silicon Valley technology companies that ran the social media platforms.

Because of the inherently left-leaning political bias of these Silicon Valley companies, this mass formation psychosis always had a leftist bent, and tended to promote radical leftist ideologues as its leaders. However, in any mass formation, the leaders are often just as caught up in the psychosis as the followers. This soon became manifest in the moral and rational incoherence of its leaders (see “What Is a Woman?”), and in the various internal contradictions of their own respective causes and beliefs. While “wokeism” is inherently political, it is not primarily characterized by a unified political ideology or movement.

The high water mark of the mass formation psychosis occured in 2020 during the covid-19 pandemic, during which it took on all of the defining characteristics of a cult (see “What is the Covid cult?”). The George Floyd riots were the major culminating event, but Trump’s ostensible defeat in the disputed 2020 elections and his subsequent removal from power in the January 6th color revolution removed the central focusing element necessary for the mass formation psychosis. Since then, the deep state and political establishment has attempted several times to find a new focusing element for the psychosis, with such issues as climate change or the Russo-Ukraine war, but thus far these efforts have proven unsuccessful (see: “I SUPPORT THE CURRENT THING!”)

At this time (March 2023), it is unclear how this mass formation psychosis will end. If Trump is re-elected in 2020, it may catch a second wind, or it may be replaced by the right-leaning mass formation psychosis characterized by Trumpism and the MAGA movement. It may fizzle out slowly, or it may be defeated by the growing demand for a religious revival in the United States. Alternately, it may prove to be the precursor of a much more dangerous mass formation psychosis, this time driven by AI and the outbreak of World War III. Regardless, the events of the next 12 to 18 months will determine which course our society will take.

My Wild Predictions for 2023

In January or February, Russia will launch a major new offensive in the Russo-Ukraine War, destroying much of the Western narrative surrounding that conflict. However, it will not be a decisive victory, and the war will not end this year.
China will launch a ground invasion of Taiwan, and will seriously miscalculate the US-allied response. This war will also continue into 2024.
A tactical nuclear weapon or dirty bomb will be used in combat, either escalating one of the ongoing conflicts or starting a new one. However, there will not be a major nuclear exchange between global powers this year.
A Washington DC politician or judge will be assassinated, most likely by a lone wolf radicalized on the internet.
Food and energy prices will continue to inflate. However, deflation will be a more serious problem for the elite managerial class.
The covid narrative is going to flip in a major way. The vaccines and the lockdowns will become anathema, and many prominent players in the pandemic (including Trump) will come under serious fire from both political sides.
Toward the end of the year, we will start to hear rumblings of another pandemic.
Deleting social media will become a major cultural trend.
President Russell M. Nelson will announce something huge in General Conference, on the order of the Come, Follow Me initiative in 2018.
In spite of all these global challenges, our family will continue to thrive and will end the year even better off than we now are, both spiritually and temporally.