Wars of Gog and Magog: Between the U.S. and Israel, our world is defined by those who view it in radically simplistic binaries.
“The Vision of Ezekiel,” by Francisco Collantes, 1630. (Web Gallery of Art, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By Patrick Lawrence
The Floutist
Orit Malka Strook serves in the Netanyahu government as minister of settlements and national missions.
She has a seat in the Knesset representing the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, a political amalgam formed last year when the Religious Zionism Party merged with the Jewish Home Party, which was itself a merger of three Zionist-extremist parties.
Orit Malka Strook’s political journey, this is to say, began on the far right and has proceeded to the far, far, far right of the Israeli constellation.
Orit Malka Strook was born in 1960 and is the product of a rigorous education in Israel’s most rigorously Zionist yeshivas. After she married in her late teens or very early twenties — the date is not clear in her publicly available biographies — Orit Malka Strook and her husband, a rabbinical student, moved to a Jewish settlement on the Sinai Peninsula.
When Israel handed the Sinai back to Egypt in 1982, the outcome of the Camp David Accords President Jimmy Carter negotiated four years earlier, Strook and her spouse moved to a Jewish settlement in Hebron.
To give an idea of Orit Malka Strook’s politics in practice, one of her sons was convicted 17 years ago of violently attacking a young Palestinian in Hebron and spent two and a half years in prison for his offense. We can infer with some confidence this must have been an especially vicious incident, as settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have been absolutely routine in the West Bank for many years.
Orit Malka Strook was horrified at her son’s criminal conviction, because the court accepted the word of Palestinians over the word of a Jew — so furthering the Palestinian cause, as she saw it, over the cause of the settlers, the Zionist cause.
Orit Strook in January 2023. (Mark Neyman / Government Press Office of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Let us set aside the thought that Israel should have no such thing as a minister of settlements given they are all illegal, as the International Court of Justice has at last ruled.
Straight to my point, Orit Malka Strook, who still resides in Hebron, has lately taken to asserting that Israel is now “living through a miraculous time,” as Amit Varshizky put it in a very important piece in Haaretz earlier this month.
Orit Malka Strook sees the Israeli assault on the Palestinian of Gaza as — from the Haaretz piece — “the birth pangs of the Messiah and the advent of redemption.”
The war in Gaza is not a war, of course, but to Orit Malka Strook it is the apocalyptic war God’s chosen wage against Gog and Magog, the evil forces described in Ezekiel and then Revelations. These are the end-days, in Orit Malka Strook’s cosmology.
Reading the Haaretz piece and looking into Orit Malka Strook’s story, my mind went immediately back to the early years of our new millennium and the regime of George W. Bush. This bears some explanation.
‘With Us, or With the Terrorists’
As readers will easily recall, Bush II authorized the invasion of Afghanistan shortly after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, stating in his well-known phrase, “You are either with us or with the terrorists.”
Bush and his minders, notably Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, respectively his vice-president and defense secretary, then set about whipping up public fervor and gathering the support of loyal clients as they planned the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Bush II had a Manichean sensibility. He was a recovering alcoholic and had become a fervent Christian, of the evangelical sort so far as one can make out, in the course of his recovery.
To Bush II our world is divided between good and evil, and this was his thought as he recruited his “coalition of the willing” — a coalition of the coerced, as I have always thought of it.
It is well enough known that Jacques Chirac and his able foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to take France into the coalition. An invasion of Iraq would destabilize the region, the French president thought (quite correctly). This made Paris a holdout among the major Western powers.
“Iraq does not represent an immediate threat that would justify an immediate war,” Chirac insisted two days before the U.S.–led invasion began. “France appeals to the responsibility of all to respect international law. Acting without the U.N.’s legitimacy, putting power before law, means taking on a heavy responsibility.”
Three-quarters of the French stood with Chirac, whose refusal to enlist France in Operation Iraqi Freedom strained Franco–American relations for several years. Remember “freedom fries” and the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?”
This was the level to which Bush II brought American discourse as he manipulated public opinion prior to the invasion. Good guys, bad guys. Black hats, white hats.
There is one detail of the U.S.–French confrontation over Iraq that remains very little known. Just before the March 20, 2003, invasion, Bush II called Chirac in a late-hour attempt to persuade him to change his mind. The exchange was very heated.
Bush II made a vigorous argument that with the events of Sept. 11 the prophesied war of Gog and Magog had at last begun. I can only imagine what went through the worldly Chirac’s mind, or indeed the look on his face, as Bush II discoursed in this manner.
I know of only one account of this conversation. It is in The Irony of American Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Walker & Co., 2010), a book William Pfaff published late in his life. The book sits at the end of Pfaff’s long and principled career as a sort of summation.
It is rightly read as his causes-and-consequences critique of American exceptionalism. And it includes, inter alia, a description of the Bush–Chirac exchange. He got it, if I recall correctly what he told me later, from a high source in the French Foreign Ministry.
Chirac addressing a U.N. event in Paris, June 2005. (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
Bill Pfaff was a colleague and a friend. He taught me to trace the path of U.S. policy from the narrow project of Soviet containment in the immediate postwar years to the never-ending messianic mission to save the world with which we now live.
Bush II and his Gog and Magog delusions were preposterous, yes. But they were, illogically and logically at once, the outcome of a consciousness that had endured — how shall we count? — since the 1945 victories, or since Wilson’s make-the-world-safe-for-democracy, or the 17th century Pilgrim landings.
Pfaff was pithily right to name his book as he did. American foreign policy has been a tragedy since the U.S. has had one worthy of the term, beginning with America’s attack on the Spanish empire in the last years of the 19th century.
With the world wars among the exceptions, it has since been a line of tragedies from Wilsonian universalism through the Cold War and Vietnam and the post–Cold War triumphalism of the 1990s.
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Libya, Syria: The tragedies have but worsened since Sept. 11. What unifies these disastrous adventures? This is simply understood.
Few senior officials since Bush II have professed to view the world as an end-times confrontation with Gog and Magog, but the fundamental belief remains just as Bush II had it: It is good-vs.-evil in our time, and it is as simple as that.
Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and another Christian true believer, actually did think and speak in terms of the end-times.
Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, formed his outlook — this by his own admission, remarkably enough — as he watched Westerns and those juvenile “Terminator” films during his youth. “I see the world as divided between good guys and bad guys,” he has unabashedly said.
We are talking, in sum, about a set of policies not rooted in thinking but in belief — irrational policies, in a word. The Cost of War Project at Brown University, a distinguished and honorable undertaking, measures the results of Washington’s post–Sept. 11 adventures quite precisely: $8 trillion, 905,000 casualties.
Orit Malka Strook is prominent among those who believe the Zionist state now confronts the evil ones prophesied in Ezekiel, but she is not alone: By no means is she an isolated figure.
“Increasing numbers in right-wing circles,” Amit Varshizky writes in Haaretz, “have lately joined Strock [sic] in identifying the war in Gaza with the War of Gog and Magog.” They subscribe, or some do, to the strange truths of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the founder of religious Zionism in the late 19th century. “When there is a great war in the world,” he preached, “the power of the Messiah awakens.”
Varshizky has picked up on a resurgent religious extremism that seems to have been evident among Israelis for some time but goes unreported by all those foreign correspondents staffing bureaus in Jerusalem and covering for (rather than covering) the Zionist state’s countless excesses while pretending to do their jobs.
‘Mein Kampf in Reverse’
Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon addressing an event at the Pentagon in 2015. (Adrian Cadiz, DoD, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Last spring Moshe Yaalon, a former Israeli defense minister and certainly a man committed to the Israeli cause, made some startling, not to say disturbing, public remarks on this topic.
His references in the following are to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben–Gvir, the fanatical finance and security ministers in the Netanyahu regime’s freak-show cabinet.
Shiloh is a Zionist journal named for a settlement recorded in Joshua with which the Old Testament god was well-pleased; it also refers to an illegal and highly controversial settlement started on the ancient site in 1978 — just as Jimmy Carter was sponsoring the Camp David talks:
“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir, they have a rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock — and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War.’
Do you hear them talking in terms of the Last War, or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’? Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse.
My hair stands on end when I say that — as he said it. I learned and grew up in the house of Holocaust survivors and ‘never again.’ It is Mein Kampf in reverse: Jewish supremacy…. It is anchored in ideology. And then actually what [Smotrich] aspires to — as soon as possible — [is] to go to a big war. A war of Gog and Magog.”
Marco Carnelos, formerly an ambassador-rank diplomat in the Italian foreign service, brought the Yaalon comments to my attention in an excellent commentary published on Aug. 19 in Middle East Eye. The Floutist will shortly consider Smotrich’s deranged, boldly racist essay in Shiloh at greater length.
We should sit up and consider carefully Yaalon’s warnings and the Haaretz report. This believing-without-thinking is well inside the Netanyahu regime by virtue of Bibi’s dependence on extremist Zionists such as Ben–Givr, Smotrich and Strook for his political survival.
There are implications to think about here. And we should then take care to connect some dots: Christian Zionists in America are less influential on the Israel question than these shockingly deluded extremists, but not by much, and America’s Christian Zionists are just as extreme in their version of “the end of days.”
We cannot look upon Israel’s Zionists with any kind of detachment or critique from some conjured place of elevated superiority. Americans have long told themselves similarly grand, delusional stories to justify their history of injustices and cruelties: Bush II’s Gog and Magog bit is merely an over-the-top telling, a variant on the theme.
U.S. policy, certainly since the Sept. 11 disasters, has been based ever less on rational calculation — to say nothing of concern for the global commonweal — than on what I think of as desperately held beliefs in the face of twenty-first century realities.
It is the same with the Israelis as the killing proceeds daily in Gaza and, increasingly, in the West Bank. Israeli policy — and this is true of American policy, too, at bottom — is conceived and executed by people who do not act rationally. They answer to their gods, whether this means Yahweh or divine Providence—“the Great Œconomist,” as some of the 18th-century historians used to put it.
There are grave implications here. Chief among them, there is no talking to these people, for they live and act behind the thick, protective wall of messianic belief. They may pretend to listen to others, but they do not hear. Nothing others may say can change them. This is a highly consequential circumstance, given the power people who act irrationally hold.
Between the U.S. and Israel, our world is defined by those who view it in radically simplistic binaries. To them there is no place for complexity in our increasingly complex global environment. One could argue this is a good definition of incompetence.
This is our dreadful predicament — dreadful because the way forward, beyond these people, cannot be but long and arduous. And here we come to a final conclusion of sorts.
Only failure holds any promise of forcing either Israel or the U.S. to change course. I unshyly applaud all the very costly foreign policy failures of both for this reason, although I must quickly add that failure very often disappoints because the policy cliques in Washington and Tel Aviv seem committed to going from one failure to the next without changing anything.
If anything, Zionist Israel appears yet more dedicated than the U.S. to its course of righteous murder and destruction in the name of its apocalyptic destiny. This seems to me the grimmest reality of our time.
If the assault Israel prosecutes in Gaza and the West Bank — and now possibly in Lebanon and Iran — is an end-days battle against Gog and Magog, how can the righteous desist, or make peace, or negotiate an enduring settlement? How can it end short of the Israelis’ destruction?
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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Just think, these psychopaths exert control over much of western governance, and virtually ALL of American governance. Go figure.
Mark my words – there is no such thing as nuclear superiority – none of will survive a nuclear attack from anyone including our own deranged government…
The Source of Binaries, Either/Or Logic
If the human brain functions that prefer this mode are not understood, they will continue to dominate politics and economics. Look up neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s 2021 2 vol 1570 pp magnum opus //The Matter With Things (Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World)//.
While both hemispheres of the brain process all input, how they do so is quite different. The right perceives gestalts, flow and connection, creativity, nuances, multivalence, and intuitions. It communicates by means of metaphor, seeking meaning and purpose. Its ways are valued by indigenous peoples and artists. It is aware of the left mode, but the reverse is not so.
In contrast, the left hemisphere, dominant since the Enlightenment. It prefers certainty and control; it is disturbed by ambiguity. It wants to grasp things–the literal physicality of manipulation and domination. It has great confidence in its own judgements since it is unable to sense what it lacks. So it operates with binary thinking. With us or against us. One correct answer or else error. We’re good, they’re bad. 1 or 0. Corporate profit or irrelevant externality.
It’s not not irrational; after all, it’s the old Aristotelian either/or. Either A or not A, the law of the excluded middle. It’s the very acme of systematic logic–but a logic that binds its adherents into a totally abstract world. From within, it makes sense. And those within cannot see beyond their own mental barriers. It’s a deep irony that religious fundamentalists have learned to think in the same limited categories as the Enlightenment rationalist philosophers they despise. And it’s another irony that for a 100 years now, physicists have been telling us that reality is uncertain and relative.
As McGilchrist points out, we will not solve our problems by means of the same processes that got us here.
There are no safe places for humans when among them religious fanatics have nuclear weapons to prosecute their beliefs in end times.
Great, very sobering piece by Mr. Lawrence. I strongly suggest everyone write to their senators and representatives and remind them there will be no survivors of the Zionist madness.
You cannot make this bullshit up!
This excellent article accurately portrays the sick reality in which we live, one so sick sane people find it impossible to accept and thus ignore it to the existential peril of all of us, sane or insane. Even worse than the emergent peril as the first war to end all wars morphed into the second.
Very well said Sir!
A pyrrhic victory would be still victorious in the demented heads of Zionist fanatics. Those who view grisly depravity and sadistic moral debasement as righteous and divine-adjacent are indeed beyond reason. Or worth considering among the living that contribute to, or at least refrain from harming, the living. American foreign policy, equally, hopelessly, based upon chimerical, self-aggrandizing notions of God-given greatness, has only become more incoherent and cretinous since 9/11. But the New Cold War stalwarts of today are echoes only of an older belief-system that was delusional too. And beliefs are the core problem. For believing and thinking, if one considers it, rarely commingle. They either battle it out or remain discreet. But what tenaciously binds the believer to their respective belief(s) is emotional in nature, therefore insoluble with thought and reason. Which has often set the world ablaze when such messianic dementia propels actions within and beyond borders.
Thank you Patrick. A brilliant and shocking article that captured me with every word. Your conclusion is prescient. Total destruction awaits those with messianic delusions. The Third Reich is an example in my mind. Negotiation is impossible with states in rapture to inhumane ideologies. Those states must be swept away and replaced. Generational change can achieve that end, as illustrated by the Bundesrepublik, which until quite recently served as the centre of a peaceful and collective Europe.
The world’s war industry has become so profitable it cannot give up. In a sense they all rely on each other for the arms race arms testing races called wars for calibrating then next war. The various branched of the military and covert intelligence agencies cooperate in competition with the other branches around the world for market share.
They are devouring all the world resources now as a growing combined NATO consortium to rule the world band its resources for themselves.
Note the governments for France and Germany soon changed and doping fried the Tour de France for 10 years..
These fools, jackasses, lunatics, and savages are a front for an entrenched oligarchy. The instability that results from these people making decisions facilitates the exercise of power by competing moneyed interests in collaboration with the national security and law enforcement apparatus. Israel is a beneficiary, instrument, and now one of the powerful components of this exercise of influence and corruption.
Sounds like the “beast from Bethlehem” (W.B.Yeats, “Second Coming”),
is on the loose and won’t be satiated even if nuclear bombs fall on Iran.
Manifest Destiny being America’s “grand delusional story” justifying
US genocide on its native people, and that great book title “Irony
of American Destiny ” has already been revealed in the sinking
of the Pequod (apologies to Herman Melville’s, Moby Dick).
As a recovering alcoholic, miniBush AKA Shrub was missing Grog and Moregrog, so why not shape policy based on the DTs?
With that POTUS suffering from delirium and today’s POTUS suffering from dementia and the hallucinating eschatological Israelis suffering from both, what could possibly go wrong?
SatanYahoo got 58 standing ovations from the US Reptilian congressmen. True collective madness.
A few days before Trump got shot, I happened to run into a Democrat while we were standing in the same line. She wanted to talk politics, but she had only one point of view. Trump was a dictator. Could not listen and was pretty much incapable of discussion on any rational basis.
When she wanted to know why I would not support the great Democrats, I mentioned that the world is either on the brink of World War III, or is already in the World War. Her reply was that “I am a Christian. So I know Armaggedon is coming, ”
The gist of the argument was apparently that trying to avoid World War was no reason not to vote Biden (now Harris) and generally Democrat. She was as happy about the the prospect of the end of the world as the Christian Right. She was certainly convinced that the possibility of the end of human society as we know it was not any reason to change what she was thinking or doing.
Seriously. That was a real conversation.I always knew that underfunding education was going to come back and bite this country hard. Nobody wanted to pay the taxes to have an educated population. Oops. And these are the people with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. And this is the method they are using to choose who to vote to be the next Great Leader. Oops. Big Oops.
Israel can make a big mess with its nukes. But the nation with enough nukes to cause the End Of Days is the Christian Nation.
The saddest aspect of your anecdote is that this level of dementia in The Land Of The Free doesn’t require religion at it’s most loathsome and scrubbed of moral consciousness to lead people down the delusional path of adherence to a respective wing of the duopoly. But, as you observe, being screamingly ignorant does. Self-interest accounts only for a micro-minority who breath the rarified air of f*ck everyone else wealth. From Wilsonianism to Cold War {I and II} delusions, America has not wanted for non-Divine excuses to embrace malignant madness.
Freud posited the Death Wish which, if true, leaves us with the problem of what to do with a suicidal action because Armageddon implies death for all; thus the Death Wish. (Of course, they get to Heaven and the rest of us have to go to hell).
Wilson through duplicity involved us in WWI, and before him McKinley in 1898 did the same in our expansion of Manifest Destiny into the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. Bush II and Biden are both religious zealots (remember “I will run unless God Almighty comes down and tells me not to”?) and sometimes they win. They aren’t defeated and they gain territory and power that increases their religious proclivities. Their prophecies cause them to think they’re prophets. Trump now claims he was protected by God who caused the bullet to miss his vitals.
When they process the Hydrogen Bomb, it is indeed difficult to decide what to do. They are a distinct minority, however.
Two points:
1.) Lawrence astutely addresses in this excellent article how Israeli society is fundamentally impossible to change, it won’t reverse its present course of genocide and destruction.
2.) G. Doctorow said a couple days ago that a Russian strike on the continental U.S.(!) is now conceivable. After all, NATO’s doing nothing but violently harassing Russia’s border region and launching incursions into Russia proper. Some reports yesterday said that Ukie officials warned Russia that they would launch serious missile strikes on Moscow and St. Petersburg.
We face an incredibly dangerous moment in the world today.
As long as there are nuclear weapons, a strike by any country is always ‘conceivable’. They are very expensive, and if they had no use, the rich people would rather have tax cuts.
The only way a ‘strike’ is inconceivable would be if we had enough sense to get rid of the dang things back when America won its Great Victory at the end of Cold War 1.3. Back when the Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight, and the Clintons were on the brink of power.
thank you so much, yet again,
for your pertinent analyses!
i would feel ill-informed, if i relied
on my EU country’s MSM only …
wish that those who keep saying:
“peace does not pay!” come to their
senses long before the end of days.
thank you so much, yet again,
for your pertinent analyses!
i would feel ill-informed, if i relied solely
on the MSM of my EU country – whose f.lawmakers
have been on the wrong track for decades thinking
that following US lead and the “rules based order!”
will lead them … where to, exactly?
they still call it “freedom and democracy!”
[and will allow US hypersonic missiles
to be stationed in my country by 2026].
traitors, as i see them, of willy brandt’s
relentless détente policy of the 1960s and 197os.
traitors also of international law, of rules they
once set themselves after two cruel world wars.
as to the binary mindset:
where do people still learn to think actions
and consequences through?
to take responsibility for their mistakes?
it’s become so complicated and tedious,
[and it also seems much too unrewarding]
that they give up at the first hurdle.
the forever question to ask here: “cui bono?”
I’m a bit surprised by this article. It seems an unfortunate case of the author confusing (?) the cover story and the superstructure of the “narrative” with reality.
Seneca is thought to have said “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” Let us never forget this. Let us not forget that, behind the obvious face of the regimes in the US, Israel, the UK, and everywhere else, behind the grotesqueries of Bush 2, Cheney, Obama and Biden, Nettanyahoo, Sullivan, not to mention the poor deluded Ms. Strook mentioned above and her ilk, there are the real powers of the world who use these representatives and pieces to build narratives obscuring their ends.
So you can have Gog and Magog, good and evil, us and them, freedom-loving capitalists vs communists, etc. etc. and, not to be seen behind the scenes are the people that matter quietly collecting obscene rents from the necessary (to them) chaos and conflicts generated.
If ever Gog and Magog become inconvenient and a different narrative is needed, be sure that the shiny new product will come down the line, represented by new salesmen with irresistible new pitches. The need to comply due to climate change, say … or the new plague … or etc. … a new cause and religion will doubtless be found and the old ones and their representatives unceremoniously thrown by the wayside.
But the sales pitches and narratives etc. should not be confused with what matters, which, as always, is about control and Benjamins ($$$).
Things go on until they can’t. In my view, the “best” thing that could happen—and I say this as an American—is the loss of primacy of the U.S. dollar in world financial dealings. That alone will place a brake upon the mischief and misery which our “indispensable” nation inflicts upon the world. When Israel no longer has a patron it will be forced into a different moral universe, if by then it has not destroyed itself. I think that destruction is inevitable, given the course Israel is following. How tragic that my country would put itself in thrall of such a tiny, insignificant and racist/supremacist polity. It is madness to follow these deluded zealots into perdition. Geopolitically, it would be infinitely more sensible to have Iran and the Russian Federation as allies, not these bloodthirsty, apocalyptical nut cases.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
— opening of ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats.
I’d say it describes the modern world quite well, but the poet died in 1939. The source I found on the web did not give a year the poem was written. Since I feel the world has been going downhill and accelerating in my lifetime, this was written back in “The Good Old Days”. America was still a democracy that could change directions from Hoovernomics to the New Deal with an election. Only a few people had heard the word “atomic”, if at all, when this was composed.
The biggest problem we face of course, is these religious “kooks” (what an appropriate last name), have many nuclear weapons capable of destroying all life on earth at their disposal. It’s not hard to imagine them resorting to using them if they face certain defeat. Even with the Nuclear Ban Treaty gaining support around the world, what are the chances countries that possess them will give them up? Perhaps our only hope is to put the companies that make and support them out of business.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to vote these nut jobs out of office.
Thank you for your fascinating analysis, Patrick, despite being so depressing. The lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
Incidentally, for the record, the title of Bill Pfaff’s book is The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy. (In case anyone else wanted to buy a copy.)
This is an important analysis, as it focuses attention on the irrational, religious aspect of what we are witnessing, which is so frequently lacking in much of what I read by those who also despair of the current situation. My belief is that we are witnessing the convergence of Power, Profit, and Prophets. Ultimately, these factions don’t have completely congruent goals. Perhaps our best chance at survival is to help magnify those contradictions. How to do that? I think we need all of us, who care about humanity, to join in and figure it out.
May that day come soon!
A fantastic article.
There is one word for people who hold such highly emotional fantasies of supremacy at the expense of reality: psychosis.
These people are utterly psychotic and they cannot differentiate between their omnipotent fantasies and reality as it is.
The war of Gog and Magog lies within these individuals. As one psychoanalyst once said: “in every fanatic lurks a secret doubt.”
It is against this doubt that these individuals are fighting so ferociously. And it is this doubt that it is projected onto other nations.
Thank you. I have been watching for a while. Once the mindset that you describe had firmly infiltrated the power structures in the former Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, it required the fall of their entire countries to dislodge them. You can be sure that the organs of the secret police/deep state, the “neocon state,” were the last institutions to fall. The necons in the US and Western countries and the Zionists in Israel are similar instances of this institutional exceptionalism metastasizing into fanaticism and now on the way to the complete destruction of their own countries and societies.
Like an addict in end-stage addiction, the US and Israel have lost the ability to moderate their own behavior. Where will the intervention come from? Will we survive it? I would not underestimate the self-made peril of our current circumstances.
“How can it end short of the Israelis’ destruction?”
Is that a problem? When religious nuts (and/or other kinds of fruitcakes) implacably destroy other people the only reasonable solution is to prevent them from doing so by whatever means may be necessary. The U.N. charter calls on civilized member countries to do that.
Again I could not agree more!