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A cynical explanation for why so many minors are dying in Israeli strikes on Gaza has been offered by a respected Western outlet: The Economist has published a piece pretending to answer why Israel is killing so many Palestinian children, or, as the British journal puts it, why “children are a very high proportion of the victims of war in Gaza.” The authors note that “in Ukraine, a conflict between two much bigger powers, children account for fewer than 550 of roughly 9,800 civilian fatalities over a much longer period.” Hence, they venture, “Gaza’s enormous child death toll reflects, among other things, its especially youthful demography.”

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Brazenly, the article removes the actual killers from the picture (the children fall victim to “the war,” not to the Israelis), gives just enough room to US President Joe Biden’s mendacious doubting of Palestinian victim figures (in reality certain to be under-counts) to make the reader wonder, and never mentions the true answer: so many children are getting killed because Israel commits one war crime after another against civilians, in pursuit of a strategy of collective punishment that amounts to genocide and ethnic cleansing (though these definitions, as is often the case with Israel’s actions, are being debated at various official levels). And also, because it can, due to the West’s complicity. In sum, an ordinary example of much Western mainstream coverage.

Yet there is more to this spin presented as cool, English-style level-headed analysis, complete with statistics and a chart. Inadvertently, the article opens a wide window on something ugly but important: The point where narratives about who has how many babies, or demography, meet the dehumanization that facilitates atrocities against fellow human beings.

As Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Middle East Institute's Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, has explained in Newsweek, dehumanizing rhetoric conveys the idea that “the lives, suffering and humanity of Palestinians are less worthy than the lives, suffering and humanity of Israelis.” And as the genocide and Holocaust expert Raz Segal has found, the Israeli assault is a “textbook case” by the criteria of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, while making others appear less than human is a typical element of genocide.

This devastating weapon of mass misrepresentation makes perpetrators, such as many Israelis now, feel willing to kill and righteous about the result. It also motivates and protects accomplices, many of them in the West’s political, media, and intellectual elites. For bystanders, those merely silent and passive in the face of the Palestinians’ desperate need for protection, dehumanizing language, which caricatures Palestinians as “animals” and “savages” and any calls for resistance as support for “terrorism” without nuance, at least suppresses empathy, numbs whatever is left of a conscience, and rationalizes flagrant moral failure.

The Economist is, of course, careful to (barely) maintain appearances by wrapping its nasty points in plenty of Sociologese about average income, fertility rates, and secondary education. But its message still comes through loud and clear: Gaza’s children are dying in droves not because Israelis are murdering them, but because there are so many of them. Dehumanization step one: Stop thinking of children as children, with names and faces; instead think of them as numbers. And on top of that, excessive numbers.

Step two of dehumanization: The fact that there are so many young Palestinians, in turn, is, we learn from The Economist, not a normal outcome of human life. By comparing Palestinians with even poorer populations in the world, the authors conclude that their high birthrates are an anomaly to be explained, they argue, by militant politics, namely the pro-natalism of Palestinian leaders, from the PLO’s late Yasser Arafat to Hamas. In short, Palestinians are depicted as people who weaponize, as we now say, their own reproduction and, thus, children.

The implication is clear if vicious. Recall that in the eyes of the US, Israel’s main Western ally, the attack on Gaza, including the starving and killing of civilians, is Israel exercising its right to self-defense. (Let’s leave aside that, under international law, Israel is a military occupying power and thus “self-defense” is not an applicable justification for use of force against the occupied territories.) Combine that with what The Economist says about Palestinian children being part of a strategy of long-term demographic warfare “by the cradle.” From here, you only have two dots to connect to arrive at the conclusion that if children are a “weapon,” it’s acceptable to exercise “self-defense” against them. Even if no one at the magazine, from authors to editors, managed to think through to the moral abyss their own argument opens up, that failure alone would be shamefully revealing.

In reality, Palestinians have had to learn to understand their children as their future with an urgency that people not historically subject to systematic ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide may not know. To then, in effect, blame the massacre of these Palestinian children by Israeli perpetrators on the Palestinian victims because they dared have so many in the face of relentless oppression, is abjectly cynical.

Jews, of course, also know this kind of urgency, above all due to Germany’s historically recent attempt to exterminate them. But the genocide of their own people has not translated into empathy from modern-day Zionist leaders. For them, the slogan “never again” means “never again to us.”

Palestinian leaders, moreover, are not the only ones with thoughts about demography. Indeed, demographic policies have been at the core of the Zionist project from the get-go in the late nineteenth century, in two shapes: as a constant pro-active concern with increasing the number of Jewish settlers and then Jewish Israeli citizens; and as an equally persistent fear of growth of the Palestinian population. Since the first ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of Palestinians (at least 700,000), begun before and continued through the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, reducing their number and keeping it low has been one of the principal reasons why Israel has always denied the Palestinian right of return, affirmed in the UN General Assembly resolution 194.

That, in turn, has been a prime factor that has made a lasting peace settlement impossible. In other words, Israel regards Palestinians and their children as a fundamental threat to national security, and that is one of the worst obstacles in the way of a settlement that would bring justice to the Palestinians and free the world from a never-ending, extremely dangerous crisis that should long have been put to rest.

How can it happen that a prestigious, opinion-shaping publication like The Economist gets away with such an article – and not just at any time, but during an ongoing assault on Gaza in which over 10,000 people have been killed, almost half of them children? The answer is that the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians, their rhetorical reduction to “bare biological life that can be extinguished without any moral doubt” – as explained by American journalist and author Ali Abunimah – has a long history.

Acute observers are pointing out that the West’s support of Israel’s actions is costing it whatever prestige it still has in the rest – that is, most – of the world. That is true and richly deserved. For what is even worse than the language of dehumanization is that it is not at all a fringe phenomenon: in the West, one can take part in this genocide-promoting practice and find resonance and recognition, rather than opprobrium and censure, as long as the victims are Palestinians. The West, while hallucinating itself as a “garden” of “values” has a long record of staggering violence combined with stunning hypocrisy. But at this moment in this ongoing history, the horrific abuse of the Palestinians – in word and deed – is its single most egregious depravity. And humanity won’t forget or forgive.

Launching their surprise attack with millions of troops and the explicit intention to wage a “war of extermination,” those Germans of yore, sought to build a “lebensraum” empire from hell, based on multiple deliberate genocides (including one of Soviet POWs), warfare with all legal or moral restraints systematically removed, and a supremacist ideology that would have designated anyone surviving among the conquered as a slave of inferior, if any, humanity.

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Recently, its fairly new commander-in-chief of has given a very combative as well as intriguingly ill-considered, even jejune interview. Speaking to Britain’s Telegraph, General Holger Neumann released several inflammatory statements. The one that has found most attention was his proud claim that his pilots stand ready not merely to fight Russia at a moment’s notice, but to strike with immediate, large-scale, and – he assumes with that special German military optimism some call fatal arrogance – devastating operations.

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In the Far East, Taiwan is currently ruled by a government so hell-bent on antagonizing the fellow Chinese on the mainland that Taipei’s political reflexes seem almost as perverse as those of Berlin: There you have the German elite which can’t find enough billions to fork over to Ukraine when Kiev and friends blow up Germany’s vital pipelines and lethally cripple its already ailing economy. And here is Taipei, getting really, really angry when the Philippines and Japan start negotiating away Taiwan’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone. Angry, that is, at – Beijing.

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But the saying is much older. It is rooted in Martin Luther’s punchy translation of the Old Testament (in the English King James Bible, the relevant passage reads “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”). Clearly, the admonition not to preen and strut lest you stumble and fall flat on your silly, overbearing face is addressed to all of us, including, for instance, Americans or Israelis.

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The agreement we are talking about is, of course, the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), according to the International Atomic Energy Agency “the centerpiece” – no less – of much that is good, beautiful, and eminently reasonable. Namely “global efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.” Germany, for instance, is a long-standing signatory.

And yet, Germany and five other NPT signatories who belong to America’s NATO client system have nuclear gravity bombs on their (formally, at least) sovereign territory, and their air forces stand ready to carry them to targets which would be – surprise, surprise – in Russia. The little piece of shyster-level legal sophistry used to cover for this obvious breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is called – wait for it – “Nuclear Sharing.” Sweet, isn’t it? The world – or, perhaps, just Europe – may end in a man-made big bang of fire and fallout, but, as they say in kindergarten “sharing is caring.”

By the way, it is obvious – and would have been to men such as Clausewitz, York (both with some serious delay, admittedly), or Bismarck – that, for instance, German officers worth their salt would have to prepare secret emergency plans for rapidly seizing those nuclear weapons on German territory from our American overlord “allies.” Without bloodshed, if possible; or with, if necessary.

One very bad day, that may well be the only way to save Germany from getting its very own “end of history” by being burned to irradiated cinders in a “limited” nuclear war waged on behalf of one or another set of madmen – or women or whatever non-binary option then in power, of course – in Washington. A quietly kept drawer with such last-resort plans in one paper copy only would be the bare minimum genuine German national interest requires. If that’s too bold for you as a German soldier, maybe don’t join the military – or just be honest, change your citizenship, and sign up with the US already.

But back to the specific arrangements adding up to this great sharing in anticipated self-apocalypsing: They are quite complicated; this is modern life, after all: if we go, we go with a bang and a lot of bureaucracy. But their essence is simple: You, sort-of-sovereign country X (say, Germany), station US nukes on your territory, which inevitably makes you a target for retaliation in (nuclear) kind. But while you are making yourself a target, those nukes remain under the full control of Washington (so much for that sovereignty).

Guarded by American troops – whose real mission is, of course, to keep the compliant clients from laying their grubby hands on them – these nukes sit ready for American orders to be used. Yes, formally, there’s some mumbo-jumbo about a “dual key,” but everyone not badly dropped on their head when in their nappies knows that’s BS. As a French officer has just confirmed to Le Figaro, France’s conservative paper of record, in reality, “there’s only one key” and – as in every decent organized-crime outfit – only one man will decide: the US president (whether currently crazy or senile or both).

Then, in case the American capo di tutti capi gives his end-of-days order, you, country X, will have the privilege to take these American nukes to Russia. Once your – not US – planes drop American nukes on Russian troop concentrations and bases or, say, Kaliningrad or St. Petersburg, just sit tight and wait for the response. It would come, even if it were the last thing they ever did. Because that’s the way the world works. Also, they have told us so.

There are variations to the “nuclear sharing” shtick: Greece for instance, has a nifty little under-the-radar (that is, the Greek public’s, not Moscow’s, rest assured) deal which means it doesn’t host US nuclear bombs but maintains a unit for helping deliver such bombs to Russia. Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, “and two unknown countries” (not to Russia, you bet) are riding nuclear shotgun, as it were, by participating in the SNOWCAT (Support of Nuclear Operations With Conventional Air Tactics) program. So sneaky!

With things set up so neatly to cheat the NPT, you would think that everybody is hunky-dory, as that old mafiosi Tony Soprano would have said. Yet far from it. In reality, the US is loudly considering expanding the “nuclear sharing” scheme, and several European states – including some for whom mere SNOWCAT-ing clearly is just not good enough – seem eager to get their own local pile of US nukes beyond their control but inviting retaliation.

At the same time, as everyone acknowledges frankly, these fresh nukes for Europe are supposed to make up for Washington withdrawing its conventional forces from the old continent. What a message: “Dear Euro vassals, we won’t stay around to fight and die with you, but we are happy to make more of you bases and delivery boys for our nukes. Hope you feel safer now. (Oh, and also, we’d love to sell you more of our overpriced F-35 (US kill switches included) that you’ll need for your bombing runs against Russia when we whistle. Deal?)

In a normal world – or to be precise, a normal Europe – the answer to such American generosity would have to be a resounding “fuck off” (in plain American English). But Europe’s elites are not sane – or really, let’s be honest, Europe’s – and so Europe is very far from normal. There seems to be a real eagerness to do, this time as well, what America wants, European interests be damned.

That’s why the so-called “NATO 3.0” project associated in particular with “brain-of-the-Pentagon” Elbridge Colby is likely to proceed just fine. Its essence is simple: Fewer US troops, key capacities, and conventional arms for Europe, so that Washington can shift its weight against China. Apart from the grandly strategic, there’s the personal: The fact that Colby’s father, while working for the CIA, helped lose the Vietnam War may play a role in shaping his son’s priorities.

Russia, if things ever went that far, is extremely unlikely to play along with this NATO 3.0 strategy, obviously. On the contrary, once US nukes land on its troops, bases, and cities, whether launched from and through European vassals or the American mainland, Moscow is likely to hit back at both.

Yet the real mystery here is not how Washington has arrived at adopting such a transparently fragile strategy. Looked at from the big, group-think blob on the Potomac, it may appear worth a try. What is truly baffling is why anyone in Europe would agree. The catastrophic disadvantages are just too obvious: Painting more targets on Europe’s back, distributing nuclear weapons further east when NATO’s eastward expansion is precisely what caused the Ukraine War, sending yet another antagonizing signal to China that Europe is straining to do what it can just to help the US pressure Beijing, and, last but not least, setting Europe up for a large-scale re-run of what the West has just done to Ukraine: devastating proxy war.

Europe does not need even more “nuclear sharing” with the unreliable, irrational, and aggressive US. It needs decoupling from its abusive and exploitative masters in Washington. If its leaders wish to share, how about doing some hard thinking about the economic and security interests their countries clearly share with both Russia and China? But then, Europe’s leaders don’t think. And when they do, then not on behalf of their own peoples. What a shared misery.

The UPA was, in effect, the military arm of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN had two political wings that mattered, one under Andriy Melnyk, the other under Stepan Bandera. They were rivals, but both were fascists.

During the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both OUN wings tried to collaborate with the Nazis. The Nazis, in their arrogance, did not always let them, but the whole OUN was very eager to please. The OUN and the UPA also participated in murderous German violence against Jews, serving as pro-active mass murder auxiliaries. In addition, they conducted a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign of their own against Poles.

Predictably, the in-your-face obscenity of Kiev’s latest fascism worship moves has provoked Israel as well as Poland. Polish president Nawrocki would like to deprive Zelensky of the high state honors that Warsaw has foolishly bestowed on him and has threatened to curtail Poland’s support for Kiev’s EU ambitions. In Israel, both its official Holocaust remembrance and exploitation agency Yad Vashem and the foreign ministry have taken exception. That is, of course, ironic, since Israel itself engages obsessively in genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as in, literally, every war crime there is. Maybe, in this case, it takes a genocidal fascist to know one.

Official Kiev is in the middle of devastating corruption scandals – but to be fair, when is it not? – and shaken by mortifying revelations about Zelensky personally (surprise, surprise: a raging narcissist on coke and not a democrat but a kleptocrat) from a well-informed insider speaking to one of America’s most influential media outlets. Yet its ruling clique finds time to really rub it in, again, just how much it cannot stop hugging Nazis, dead and alive. Costs in foreign-policy terms? Apparently, no big deal: When the Nazi-loving urge itches really bad, to hell with caution and – very unusually for Kiev – even dissembling.

Some observers speculate that the fascism fetish is being escalated in public again because of the scandals and always plunging popularity of the regime: Zelensky and the rest of his merry gang of war profiteers and proxy war meatgrinder jockeys, such commentators believe, are merely using the Nazi play “out of a position of weakness,” to distract from the extraordinarily, unprecedently fetid swamp into which they have turned Ukraine’s always sleazy politics.

This is a mistake. It is time that even the slowest in the West accept a simple truth about Zelensky, one he is not even hiding (like so many others): He genuinely likes fascists. And, with his extremely cynical manipulation techniques, his vicious persecution of political opposition and any dissent, his abuse of the mass media for propaganda, and his deep contempt for democracy, he has much heartfelt affinity with them, to say the least.

Silly – and, actually, racist – pseudo-arguments, advanced by Western proxy war boosters that Zelensky can’t possibly ally with a violent far right because he is Jewish deserve no serious answer. The current Israeli regime and its policies of war, genocide, supremacy, and ethnic cleansing are fascist. Case closed.

In fact, the Zelensky regime has a longstanding, consistent habit of pandering to, working with, employing at high levels and on a large scale, and honoring the very far right. Some may love to quibble – bored-academic-style – about pedantically precise terms for fine distinctions in one big pile of rottenness. But, in reality, those labeled Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, fascists, ultra-nationalists and so on form a large whole having much more in common than not.

Re-labelling has also served to spread big fat lies: Indeed, in the case of Ukraine there is a long, foul tradition, reaching back far into the frozen depths of the first Cold War, of mendaciously re-packaging Ukrainian World War Two fascists with their own bloody flavor of terror, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. But re-labelling these Ukrainian fascists “integral nationalists” makes about as much sense as calling Idi Amin Dada – once ultraviolent dictator of Uganda and rumored to have sampled a few of his victims – an “integral vegan.”

And so it is in the present, too: Play with words as much as you like, a fact remains a fact: Zelensky’s Ukraine is state with a big fascism problem. In time, its roots reach back to the period between World Wars One and Two, with a massive escalation during the latter. Regionally, it used to be concentrated in western Ukraine and, after the Soviet victory over fascism in 1945, among fugitives in the US, Cananda, and Europe. There, with their brand of ready-to-kill fascist anti-Communism, they served the West in the first Cold War and systematically subverted Ukrainian communities and any institution they could buy their way into, such as Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this self-declared Ukrainian “diaspora” – ironically, a term popularized out of the same Israel-envy that produced an unseemly urge to politically claim a Holocaust of one’s own in the shape of the “Holodomor” (preferably with even bigger victim counts) – re-entered independent Ukraine and “repatriated” its ideology, vitiating Ukraine’s culture and politics with, unfortunately, great success.

In that, long-term sense, Zelensky and his regime’s sympathy for the fascist devil is part of a longer story. Yet Zelensky’s personal contribution is not merely substantial but crucial. First because he has simply gone much farther than any post-independent leader of Ukraine in making fascism part of a deeply sick new normality. And second, because in our world of often imbecilic identity politics, he has, in effect, exploited his Jewishness to promote his normalization of fascism. It is hard to imagine a greater intellectual and moral perversion. But then, this is Zelensky.

Genuine, decent conservatives tend to have much to say – about, for instance, such vital things as religion, culture, and the family – that is well worth listening to, whether you agree or not. And unlike dour, doctrinaire, and frequently neurotic Centrists, genuine conservatives often have the calm self-confidence that comes from being authentic, and thus they can afford tolerance and a sense of humor, even humility.

Alas, it seems that, in the West, such decent conservatives are if not on the verge of extinction, then at least seriously endangered. And, ironically, their worst enemies are not my sort of people, the often all-too-toothless Left.

What decent conservatives have to fear the most are their own fellow conservatives, but of the indecent kind. In the US – and not only – that indecency takes a specific form, namely spineless, profoundly unpatriotic submission to the interests of a foreign, and, as it happens, genocidal (and then some), state and its powerful lobby, Israel.

Case in point: Thomas Massie, a prominent and influential US Congressman from Kentucky. Massie has just been defeated by, in essence, his own political tribe: After serving seven consecutive terms in Congress for the Republican Party since 2012 and usually “cruis[ing] to victory” in primaries – that is, pre-elections deciding who will run for a party – he has now lost his latest primary and thus, in effect, his seat in Congress.

Primaries are frequent, but this one has attracted much special interest. And rightly so: It clearly was of great national significance, as US President Donald Trump himself went out of his way to launch and support the challenge to Massie, turning the humble local vote in a fairly remote district in a usually not-so-prominent state (strictly speaking, Kentucky is a “Commonwealth”) into a personal loyalty test: All who are with me – Trump in effect said – kiss my ring, and do not dare vote for Massie the rebel!

In that sense, Massie’s defeat by the largely unknown and politically inchoate newcomer Ed Gallrein is a victory for Trump. Once again, the man who made and betrayed MAGA has proven that he can stop – or at least, disrupt – the political careers of Republicans who oppose him. After a long, acrimonious relationship, Trump has won the divorce: Even during his first term he had called for, in effect, purging Massie from the Republican party. By the time of his second term, Trump publicly called him a “LOSER” and a “BUM” (yes, all in capitals, Trump-in-rage-style) to be ousted from office.

But the struggle between a narcissistic president habitually driven foaming-at-the-mouth furious by anything but full, unconditional submission and an independent-minded Congressman, who opposed that president on multiple key issues – for instance, Trump’s Covid policy, the “Big and Beautiful” Bill, and the Iran War – is only part of this story. And not the most important one.

What has really cost Massie his seat is, in one word, Israel. Or to be more precise, Massie’s open defiance of the Israel lobby in the US and the perverse relationship between the latter and most of America’s political elite. This is the US, after all, whose president openly boasts of his approval ratings not at home – where, admittedly, he has nothing to boast about – but in Israel, where Trump jokes, he could run for prime minister once he is done with the US.

According to Tucker Carlson, himself a highly influential conservative rebel against Trump as well as the Israel lobby, Massie is the only Republican in Congress – out of currently 217 – who has never taken money from the lobby. According to Massie, not for want of offers: the lobby, he reports, has attempted to buy him for years. Consistently saying no has made him a target for removal instead. For now, unfortunately, with success.

And the Israel lobby really made it rain this time. Megyn Kelly, like Massie and Trump an American conservative (by now) in opposition to Trump, has also dedicated a long segment of her very popular show to Massie’s defeat. With its total cost of over 32 million dollars, this was the most expensive congressional primary in US history. According to Kelly, of that obscene total – a new local record in America’s long tradition of the worst-democracy-money-can-buy – 9 million came from AIPAC, that is, the institutional core of the Israel lobby (at least in public) and another 7 million from an especially established Super PAC – in essence, an election-buying-and-manipulation machine – that channeled the brazen intervention of billionaires, such as Myriam Adelson and Paul Singer, who are also Israel lobby mainstays.

What has Massie done to deserve such hostile largesse? Massie is, of course, not an “antisemite,” although that smear has predictably been used against him. He is not even consistently against the genocidal apartheid state of Israel (as is, full disclosure, the author of these lines).

Massie’s real sins are breathtakingly simple: Massie has fought, with some if limited success, for transparency in the case of the convicted sex criminal, massively Israel-connected agent of influence, and certainly not suicide victim, Jeffrey Epstein. And he has argued that America is in such horrendous debt that it should stop supporting other countries, including the single greatest and strategically counter-productive drain on its resources, Israel.

That is enough in today’s America: to insist that Americans have a right to know about a hyper-connected criminal who was busy buying and blackmailing US elites and that Americans have no obligation to sacrifice their taxes to Israel. To insist, in other words, on American national interest.

That Massie then consistently also opposed Trump’s insane policy to waste US lives, wealth, and international standing (a very depleted resource anyhow) by obeying Israel’s order to attack Iran only strengthened his enemies’ resolve to destroy him at least politically.

This need not be the end of the story. Massie, for one, has already promised that he will use his remaining time in Congress to expose more individuals who were involved with Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. He has also not ruled out a run for president in 2028. Neither does Tucker Carlson, as it happens.

For now, Trump, and through him the Israel lobby, are maintaining their devastating grip on US politics. Before it finally loosens, Americans lack not only genuine democracy but even elementary sovereignty. The key question facing their nation is simple: Will the shameless manipulation of their politics by the lobby of a foreign country continue to escalate or will it, at long last, provoke a backlash that, as a minimum, would restore US independence? And perhaps the possibility to survive as a decent conservative in American mainstream politics.

None of the above is news. Keen observers have long understood that things get shaky when a majority loses their belief in – or at least passive acceptance of – the prevalent ideology (in the original meaning of the term, namely as the elite’s imaginative story about reality, keeping the non-elites compliant).

In such a situation, things will change, but it is hard to predict how exactly. An acute ideology-reality mismatch can lead to rebellion and, if the latter succeeds, revolution. Yet it can also make the elites ramp up the indoctrination or become more punitive, adding more direct compulsion, to keep those below in line. There also always is the option of going to war with enemies abroad – real or, much more likely, invented – to distract from the disunity at home. Finally, all of the above can happen in messy sequence or even at the same time.

Despite differences and tensions, the West does constitute some form of political and social order. In its elites’ ideology, as spread by their compliant mainstream media, it is a fairy-light realm of political and economic freedom, combining representative democracy with free markets, the rule of law, individualism, and superior “values” to make the best of all possible worlds. In reality, obviously, it’s a darkening zone of capitalist oligarchy with increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Not the Hobbits’ cozy shire; rather Sauron’s domain under construction.

Markets, for one thing, are not “free,” but routinely and crassly gamed by insiders. Currently for instance, both the beginning of the criminal Israeli-US war against Iran and deliberately timed, repeated rumors about peace have facilitated manipulative trades over billions of dollars.

Likewise with the attacks of eleventh September 2001, that evil Big Bang of our current iteration of mass manipulation, authoritarian power grabs by “emergency” response, permanent warfare, and lying so intense it sometimes is hard to remember there is a truth, as the rebellious US ex-MAGA conservative Tucker Carlson has just reminded us: 9-11 as well was accompanied – and preceded – by trading for which the description “highly suspicious” is an understatement.

Democratic political representation and freedom of thought and speech are, at best, if not outright deceptions, then myths. That is, a messy hodgepodge of scraps of reality and large doses of invention. And those scraps of reality are diminishing ever further.

Concerning freedom, Britain under the widely hated Starmer regime, for instance, is a Zionist police state that smears as “antisemitism” and suppress not only any action on behalf of the victims of Israel’s crimes, including genocide, but also statements of public solidarity with them. There is no rule of law worthy of the name: perfectly legitimate speech is prohibited as “terrorist,” the police serve to harass political dissidents and the courts and their procedures – never much to rely on (ask Julian Assange) - are brazenly bent out of shape to produce unfair trials and punitive sentences.

Regarding representation, take Germany, for instance: It now has a breathtakingly, historically unpopular government that is only even in place because the last election saw widespread and statistically bizarre miscounts which accumulated – very un-randomly – to conveniently eliminate a whole new-left party (the BSW), and thus its voters, from parliament.

The German new right (AfD) and its voters, meanwhile, are openly threatened with unconstitutional punishments if they dare succeed too much: Vote too much AfD and your kid’s high school diploma will be treated like dirt. Yes, that crude; that really is the current level of shamelessness among Germany’s self-radicalizing Centrists.

Even the most conformist inhabitants of the West, moreover, cannot close their eyes anymore to the empirical fact that conspiracies are all too real and exert great, heinous influence by vicious means: You cannot have both your masses soundly believing in the myth of fair popular representation and an Epstein scandal, that is proof of the massive over-representation of very particular and even foreign-state interests through networks of subversion and blackmail. The system may survive at first, but its base will be undermined by mass frustration and cynicism.

Today’s real-existing West, in short, has much in common, and most of it is terrible. That is why we are observing one big trend across it now: In the words the Wall Street Journal – not usually known for subversive dissidence – “Europeans are fed up and taking it out on their leaders.” Polls show massive discontent across NATO-EU Europe. And not only polls but real elections, too: Britain’s Starmer regime has just received a horrific drubbing in local elections that may well mark the impending end of the UK’s dysfunctional and unfair two-party system.

In a study rating the popularity of 24 leaders, the three lowest rungs are taken by those of France, Germany, and Britain: The top-tier of the NATO-EU Europe complex is identical with the dregs of popularity. But that doesn’t mean others are doing much better. Italy’s, the Netherland’s, and Spain’s leaders all have disapproval ratings between 55 and 57 percent.

But what would the West be without its “indispensable” leader? Peruse the Financial Times, another mainstream media outlet above any suspicion of rebelliousness, and you’ll find that there is unhappy harmony across the Atlantic: In the US, more than half of all voters disapprove of President Trump’s policies, too.

Almost 60 percent are unhappy with Trump’s handling of inflation. Just like his awful predecessor, the senescent Gaza Genocide accomplice Joe Biden, Trump is now haunted by a cost-of-living crisis. Like Biden, Trump has only himself to blame: the two key factors driving up consumer prices are his crude tariffs and his predictable fiasco in Iran. Fifty-five percent of voters believe that Trump has hurt the economy; only a fourth think he has helped it.

It is always tempting to focus on each case of malaise individually: here the German mess with its peculiar East-West tension and its comically self-pitying leader Friedrich Merz, for instance; there the French decrepitude with its constitutional design flaws and the raging narcissist Emmanuel Macron at the center; and there again, the British establishment’s traditional vassalage to the US combined with its perverse relationship to Zionism and genocidal Israel. In the case of the America, it is, of course, the upcoming midterm elections that attract most attention.

But what if we adopt a longer view? Where is all of this misery going? Again, more than one outcome is possible. Full disclosure: I find things desperate enough not to mind rebellion and revolution. But it would be foolish not to consider other scenarios, namely those that Western elites would prefer: Increasing repression is an obvious fact already. Distraction by war abroad as well: those labeling the Israeli-American assault on Iran Operation Epstein (instead of “Epic”) Fury have nailed it. Berlin, being Berlin, naturally is gearing up for fighting Russia directly (as opposed to “only” indirectly as it is now), and so is, alas, much of the NATO-EU complex. The future is unpredictable. Except for one thing: Change is inevitable. Don’t bank on it being for the better.

The Three-Step is by no means foolproof. Witness, for instance, the recent de facto defeat of the US (and its at least occasional overlord Israel) at the hands of Iran, which even arch neocon warmonger Robert Kagan has as good as admitted in, of all places, The Atlantic. But failure has never deterred America’s best and brightest. Indeed, the combination of slow, sadistic strangulation of whole nations and taking the military baseball bat to them is a virtual fixation, as central to American foreign policy as permanent bad faith.

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That’s why the same man who extolled the “white man’s burden” also wrote “The Man Who Would Be King,” a story of two lowlife, ambitious adventurers who manage to swindle their way to becoming kings as well as rich in a remote country on the fringes of the British Empire, then at its late-nineteenth-century zenith of global “primacy.” Until, that is, one of them makes the mistake of messing with the wrong woman, who ends up biting him in public. Seeing him bleed, his subjects realize he is a mere mortal and mercilessly shake off the two imposters.

Ukraine’s ruler – and de facto king (of the old-fashioned, non-constitutional kind) – Vladimir Zelensky is a social climber, too, In his formative years, his native Krivoi Rog was a provincial post-Soviet rustbelt town with a lively gangster scene, a “bandit city” in his own words. Zelensky is also an expert in make-believe by profession, a cynically profane showman of the “give-them-whatever-they-want-as-long-as-it-pays” variety, the cruder and smuttier the better.

Indeed, Zelensky even has a sidekick, who, as in Kipling’s dark story, has shared in the scheme of power-grabbing and plunder: Andriy Yermak, his former chief of staff and very intimate friend, making headlines (again) for being so corrupt and sinister he stands out even in Kiev.

And now Zelensky, the man who, it seems, would be Ukraine’s president forever has just been bitten in public by a woman. Judging by the fierce, clearly orchestrated reaction of his media propagandists in Ukraine and the fact that the Western mainstream media are largely pretending not to have noticed, he must be bleeding, too.

The woman is his former press secretary Iuliia Mendel. And she has been able to draw (metaphorical) blood because Tucker Carlson, American alternative-media heavyweight and conservative dissident from Trumpism has interviewed her for his show.

That has made it a very public bloodletting indeed. What Mendel has had to say is one thing, her ability to reach breathtaking numbers of Americans and other inhabitants of the West is at least as important and, from Kiev’s point of view, frustrating: Across various platforms, shows of the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) are watched by, on average, over 55 million viewers, dwarfing, for instance, Fox News (Carlson’s former employer) with its prime time rating of 3.2 million.

Recently, the Israeli-US war against Iran has further undermined public confidence in the mainstream media – yes, even further – and boosted TCN. “Explosive growth” in the two first months of the war has produced over 1.5 billion “views across social media and podcast platforms.” Indeed, TCN is on such a roll that Carlson is now rumored to be a contender for the presidency, and he has not ruled out a run.

This is the amplifier for Mendel’s harsh memo to the US and the West. It is hard to think of a bigger one. And what a message she had to deliver.

Consider a few highlights: Speaking, she underlined, as “an insider,” from her own close experience with Zelensky and the inner circle of his regime, Mendel has told us all that she believes Zelensky personally “stands behind many schemes of money laundering” and that he has always remained an “amazing actor” whose image “on camera” is “very different” from his real self.

For instance, while he is posturing as not merely some democrat but a shining epitome of democracy as well as everything else that is good and beautiful, such as rule of law, freedom of speech, civil society, and national unity, his real view, relentlessly repeated behind closed doors, is, as we learn from Mendel, that “Ukraine is not ready for democracy” and “dictatorship is an order,” too.

So much, by the way, for those Zelensky propagandists in Ukraine and the West who habitually smear every critic of his devastating regime as diminishing Ukraine or not trusting ordinary Ukrainians with “agency.” The one really despising his compatriots as too backward to rule themselves and in need of a strong – namely, his – hand, is, it turns out, Vladimir Zelensky. And as Mendel rightly points out, that also means that he does not symbolize or provide unity but abuses it.

Zelensky’s profound hypocrisy permeates his private life and politics. Mendel reveals, for instance, that he was still going on trips to Crimea – to have fun with friends and drugs – while it was already under Russian control. In December 2019, he privately told Russian president Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would never join NATO. While Zelensky’s public poll ratings are steadily declining, the polls produced for internal use are so bad that even some of his fixers privately admit that he is “unelectable.”

With no respect for the truth, Zelensky’s attitude to reality itself seems broken, even deranged. From her own conversations with him, Mendel reports that Ukraine’s leader believes that “it doesn’t matter what is [actually] happening.” Things, he has argued behind closed doors, become real when they are said often enough by enough propagandists or, as she quotes him, by “thousands of talking heads.” Considering this bizarre outlook, it is revealing and revolting but also somehow, sadly consistent that Zelensky, who is Jewish, has literally demanded “Goebbels”-type “propaganda” from his communications team.

Beyond a ruthless and deliberate regime of lying and manipulation, there also is pressure and compulsion. Again, Mendel’s catalogue of Zelensky’s dictatorial strong-arm methods is depressing and plausible: from threats to perfectly illegal “sanctions” imposed by personal fiat of Zelensky, to lawfare and process-as-punishment to long and open-ended jail terms to sending critics to the frontline as a punishment to very odd lethal accidents – Zelensky and his regime have, as Mendel puts it, “no limits.” Their rule has established a situation that is “inhuman.”

Mendel is believable. Zelensky regime propagandists, in Ukraine and the West, have, unsurprisingly, smeared her as, in effect, a Russian asset, as reproducing “Russian narratives” and, worst sin of them all, sharing Kiev’s very dirty secrets with the West. Because – this seems to be the underlying logic – the West must share hundreds of billions with Zelensky and his ultra-corrupt cronies, but no one has a right to share the truth about them with the West.

In reality, Mendel’s biography proves that she is what she claims to be: an insider who has had enough. She has had an exemplary “national” career and if she had not broken with Zelensky a few years ago, she would still be the eager cadre who once caused scandals for physically shoving away journalists to protect her former boss.

Even in the interview with Tucker Carlson, Mendel has made a point of carefully distinguishing between what she has seen herself and what she knows from – extremely strong – circumstantial evidence, for instance, that Zelensky has a long-standing cocaine habit.

And yet, by now Mendel – who displays no favor at all to Russia – considers Zelensky an evil and the key obstacle to peace for Ukraine. This peace, she warns, is the only alternative to what she calls being “on the verge of extinction.” And she means it quite literally: There are far fewer Ukrainians left in the country than official statistics admit, perhaps 25 million, including 11 million impoverished pensioners. The only way to really support Ukraine, Mendel insists, is to “push for peace.”

Yet this is where, unfortunately, Ukraine’s would-be king is different from Kipling’s adventurers. They at least had no support from the empire on the fringe of which they ran their scheme of mass manipulation and self-enrichment. When their subjects lost their illusions, they fell.

Zelensky and his crew, however, still enjoy massive, cynical support from the West, even if it is now Germany and no longer the US that is in the lead. Perhaps Zelensky’s rule and its mistreatment of Ukraine and ordinary Ukrainians can only end when he loses his last Western backers. Until then, Mendel can make them bleed, but Ukrainians alone, it seems, will find it hard to shake them off.

And what has all that fear been about? In essence, a very simple thing: being abandoned by Uncle Sam, because NATO-EU European elites have a breathtakingly perverse relationship with the US, the greatest abuser of the sovereignty of their countries and spoiler of the prosperity of most of their citizens.

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That’s why Iran has sovereignty, but Germany does not. Iran has withstood two months of a devious and brutal war of aggression waged by the US and Israel, which in turn is “merely” the culmination of decades of assaults by economic warfare, assassination campaigns, and subversion. And yet, Iran has not only successfully foiled the current Israeli-American Blitzkrieg-and-regime-change scenario but also put the attackers on the backfoot. Tehran’s achievement is already historic. It has changed and will change the course of global history.

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That the latter is in very bad shape is obvious from the compulsive manner in which Britain’s leader Keir Starmer keeps insisting that it still exists, while also emphasizing that he “will remain laser-focused on what is in the British national interest.” Indeed, the abysmally unpopular Starmer has been subjected to so much typical Trump-hazing that, as the British Guardian notes, he may be enjoying “a vanishingly rare moment of public approval for his relatively robust response.”

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But then, there also was another puzzle: How could their self-besotted visionary-in-chief, hobby philosopher (with a bent to sinister German stuff), and obviously mentally less than stable wanna-be-genius of a leader have gotten a whole nation of, apparently, reasonably educated people to go along? And not just go along, but go along to the very, very bitter end.

That question was all the more disturbing in view of the fact that Adolf Hitler had not been shy about displaying his insanity and extremely bad intentions well before conservative elites installed him in power in 1933. Hitler’s book-length – indeed two-volume – manifesto of German fascism (AKA Nazism) Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and 1926, sold more than 12 million copies and was translated into over a dozen languages.

And those ready to brave its pathological me-me-me-and-HISTORY narcissism, daft hodge-podge ramblings about the better and the lesser parts of humanity, and brownshirt-bro bombast to read it through could not say that the future Leader had been concealing where he intended to lead Germany and, really, the world.

Indeed, Hitler’s manifesto could have served as an all-alarms-howling, bright-red-lights-flashing-everywhere, get-the-strait-jackets-now warning. The main points of Nazi Germany’s evil to come were all there, laid out in general but with stunning honesty: empire building with industrial-strength brutality, extermination or at least slavery for those considered inferior and superfluous, and last but not least, eternal primacy of one master country – primacy, as we’d say now in American English – to be achieved and maintained by all and any means, because that country – in Hitler’s case Germany – was defined as superior to all others by definition and called upon to lead the world, forever.

It is one of those bitter ironies of history that Alex Karp, CEO of the very peculiar software company Palantir, who regularly refers to his Jewish family background and what it would have meant for him under the Nazis, has recently released a manifesto that also should serve as a warning to the rest of us. A summary of his longer tract “The Technological Republic” (co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska) – the second volume in the age of mass distraction and attention deficit, so to speak – the twenty-two point X post has provoked a great backlash.

Cas Mudde, well-known expert on the far right, has called it “Technofascism pure!” (with an exclamation mark in the original). Yanis Varoufakis feels that “if Evil could tweet, this is what it would!” (with another exclamation mark). Mudde has also called for a full stop to all cooperation with Palantir by European companies and government agencies. Even Eliot Higgins, founder of Cold-War re-enactment tool and Western information war front Bellingcat has been moved to – mild irony. How daring! (My exclamation mark.)

And these are not over-reactions. Karp’s Palantir Manifesto really is an astonishingly open self-exploration of a very sick mind’s vision for the future of humanity, arguing, in effect, for an open-ended AI arms race (a big Kaching! for Palantir, by the way), bringing back German and Japanese militarism, racism masked as realism about cultural backwardness (as it happens, also a Nazi “Kulturträger” move, which Karp should have heard about in his German years), and, last but not least, letting our brilliant billionaires and new elites in general off the hook when they mess up, such as with on private islands having fun with a serial child rapist - that sort of thing. How unselfish.

It is also painfully, criminally badly written – plus ça change… – in a style that combines mock-Oswald Spengler Götterdämmerung kitsch (“The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.”) with sheer non-sequitur inanity (Why, again, can’t we have economic growth and security without any of that “ruling class decadence”?).

There are passages that read like young Jordan Peterson – age 15 and on too much diet coke – trying to be deep, really, really deep for the first time: “Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed” and “our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.”

After the inimitable practice of America’s war idiot-in-chief Don Tzu of Hormuz, Alex and his Palantir friends are giving us their I Ching of the tech dim. Lucky us: So much American primacy and then we get Silicon Valley meta, too!

Yet farcical as Karp’s manifesto is, it is, of course, a deadly serious matter. After all, we live in a world where Palantir has already risen to far too much power. Founded as a CIA spin-off after the oh-so-unforeseen terror attacks of 11 September 2001, backed by totally normal Epstein-buddy, “transhumanist,” and antichrist-obsessive Peter Thiel, Palantir has grown into a bloody monster, combining, in true fascist style, the logics of efficiency and extermination with its software tools, such as Gotham, Foundry, or Maven, while mass-spying on everything and everyone it can, and systematically embedding itself in international business and government to become – or appear – indispensable.

Palantir – named after all-seeing magic stones used by the villains of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (again: don’t say you weren’t warned) has already produced so much evil that a short worst-of-the-worst sample must do: The company has officially denied being involved in genocidal Israel’s use of AI to mass-murder Palestinians faster. Curiously enough, Alex Karp has, however, smirkingly admitted the fact in public. Regarding the deployment of Palantir’s targeting software in the American-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, the company is not even denying it.

But Palantir never rests. While deeply and proudly involved in genocidal slaughters and imperialist warfare, it also subverts peacetime societies pervasively. In Britain, for instance, a backlash has set in against the state’s reckless handing over of police powers and extremely sensitive data (for instance, in the spheres of finance and health) to the American CIA-offshoot gone rogue. In Germany, Palantir systems are used for policing in at least three of its federal states, Hesse, North-Rhine Westphalia, and Bavaria. In the US, Palantir has, of course, already so deeply invaded the state that it does not only help it fight its criminal wars abroad but also, for instane, terrorize its migrants and some non-migrants, too, at home.

Indeed, Palantir is so evil that even its own employees are beginning to wonder if they might, actually, be the bad guys. Hint: Yes, you are. And we all know.

For the rest of us, that is, almost all of us on this planet afflicted by Silicon Valley: It’s time to believe them when they tell us to our faces that they are coming for us. Palantir is a clear and present danger to humanity. Its CEO is an extremely dangerous maniac, its mission is subversion, surveillance, and violence, and its only Achilles Heel may be that old nemesis of the wicked: hubris. The sort of hubris that makes you display your perverse mind and announce your horrible aims in a manifesto we should all call Alex Karp’s Mein AI.

Indeed, if you try to resist the killers and their accomplices, the police and state prosecutors will aggressively and relentlessly go not after them but you and, in effect, protect the criminals. Imagine, finally, that while you cannot strike the killers directly, you can make committing their heinous crimes harder for them by disrupting their business activities and alerting the public to their scandalously uninhibited activities and shocking power in your society.

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There are good reasons why this cooperation has raised eyebrows. For one thing, it reflects not only VW’s bad and growing problems but those of Germany’s vital automobile sector, and thus, really the German economy as a whole. As the Financial Times has noted, the VW-Rafael project would mark “the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged,” trying to save itself by entering the “booming defense sector.”

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Nowadays, though, we have proudly advanced. Now, we have a whole 27-member-450-million-people European Union that is run by an unelected German who really serves the US and has, a bit like Siegfried or Brunhilde, a special “shield” (about which more below) to protect a “democracy” (yes, scare quotes) administered and defined by an intransparent, privileged, and aloof nomenklatura of equally unelected bureaucrats.

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