Despite of everything, all our efforts to commence a serious, solid and professional joint work are rejected out of hand.

“There is a well-known style, a rough, clumsy algorithm. Dirty provocations are organised, and the guilty side is determined in advance.

The so-called “investigation” is conducted almost completely on the basis of information from social networks and several international non-governmental organisations, which have tainted themselves long ago by fakes, forgeries, primitive fabrications and so on.

This unworthy style is clearly observed in the so-called ‘Skripal’s case’, Syrian chemical dossier, and previously, in the fabrication of pretexts for military invasion to Yugoslavia and Iraq.

-Russian Ambassador to Australia Grigory Logvinov, in response to Russia being definitively implicated in the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine in 2014.

 The Kremlin said on Tuesday that U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other related crimes would end one day, describing it as pointless.

“There’s hope that it will wind up one day,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the investigation.

“In Russian, it’s called passing water through a sieve,” he said of the U.S. probe, using a Russian expression that means flogging a dead horse. “That’s exactly what the process looks like.”

One of the big questions of the Trump Era has been whether he is stupid, is deranged, is absolutely unable not to lie, or if he plots out his provocations for maximal effect. And the answer, most likely, is: all of it.

That’s what we see at the top, a tweet string yesterday unintentionally lightened up by his under-two-hour commitment to actually work at being President. In it, he blurts out all the keyphrases and incantations that the right has ben picking up: Fake News, Spygate, Phony Russian Witch Hunt, Rigged Russia Witch Hunt, 13 Angry Democrats, Crooked Hillary, Obama/Comey/Lynch et al.  He spouts how the only collusion (or: Collusion) was by the Dems.

On the surface, of course, it is a madshow, absolute blubbering insanity. But it makes a little more sense in light of the Russian statement about MH-17, in which it was shown (though it was known) that Russian soldiers downed a civilian plane as part of their wildly illegal invasion, division, and annexation of Ukraine.

You see a fairly similar use of language here: the Syrian Chemical Dossier, the scare quotes around the Skripal Case, because it is absurd to think that Russia is responsible for an enemy of Moscow being poisoned in Russia, the use of “fakes” and “phonies” and “forgeries” to describe a 4-yr multinational investigation.

This method of argument (if one could call it that) hinges on the knowledge that there is too much information in the world today, and too many easy recourses to alternate realities, that if you say enough things they’ll stick somehow. At the very least, they’ll confuse the issue, and force your opponents to spend time arguing one point.

Like, if you want to point out how absurd it is to say that Moscow was somehow framed for Skripal, you have to go into the whole history of Litvinenko, of Yuschkenko, of Politkovskaya, of Nemtsov, each of which have their own conspiracies you could spend the rest of your life debunking.

The Russians, for very complicated reasons, have perfected this as part of their “active measures”. They can frame everything that pains Russia in a bad light as part of this long-running conspiracy against Russia, which stretches back through time, and can incorporate elements as disparate as international Jewry and Hitler.

In his book The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder uses the term schizo-fascists to describe actual Russian fascists, like literal-Balbo-type ones, who use the term fascist to describe any enemy of Russia. I think it is a sort of clunky, but very useful term, and absolutely describes this phenomenon.

Because think about it: if you are talking to an honest-to-god fascist, and saying that you oppose them, and they say, “of course you do, you fascist”, what do you say? Do you talk to them about how their policies and ideas are drawn directly from the fascism of the 30s and 40s, filtered through the local context and mythologies?

Imagine doing so! And then they’ll say that you’re suppressing their speech, and are in fact the true fascist! Antifa are the real Nazis! Anti-Rosanne’s are the real racists! Democrats are the real corrupt ones!

It’s impossible to argue against it, not just because anyone can find a conspiracy theory to back that up (and what the undead Ukrainian journalist did, while understandable and probably right and undoubtedly pretty awesome, will only give more ammo to these sides), but because you are quickly reduced to their shouting level. I’m angry right now. No, goddammit, you’re clearly the fascist you’re wearing a skull armband. 

Yes!

That’s what Trump is doing, intentionally or not. There’s a chance he just hears these things on Fox, and believes them, because he is both the kind of dummy who believes conspiracies and the megalomaniacal paranoid dissonance-addict who thinks everything he does was done to him, and worse, by someone else. He might just be regurgitating whatever he thinks makes him sound good.

But his one great skill has always been to manipulate the minds of people through sheer bullshit, and now he has a constant megaphone with which to do it. He knows, I think, that throwing everything out there will convince enough people and throw the rest of us off guard, unbalanced, unsure of where to strike. Which bit of that madness do we argue? Which section of this flood do we try to mop up?

That’s the international right’s methodology, Russian-inspired, and it is what unites them as much as white supranationalism. It’s a tool for advancing their agenda. And it works, because when you don’t care about truth, you win. When you think that facts are just wobbly toys to be knocked over, you win. When you internalize the idea that all liberals and multinationals are evil and conspiring against you and control the media, and that you can fight against them by any means needed, and that lying in that service is a higher form of honesty, you can win.

And yes, I know that now I sound like a conspiracist, ranting about their methods. That I don’t think they are terribly organized, but rather inspired by each other, doesn’t matter. That I don’t think it is a conspiracy doesn’t matter. What matters is that I sound like I do, and now I am defending it, and that’s all that matters.

Seriously, like two years ago this guy was a garden-variety Tea Party nobody. 

In a speech yesterday, our Secretary of State, the terrible Tea Party Christianist bigot Mike Pompeo, presented his idea of diplomacy in the aftermath of the United States’ violation of the Iran deal: colonialism.

In essence, Pompeo told Iran that they would be faced with the most devastating sanctions in human history if they didn’t comply with his list of 12 demands. This, on its face, was nonsense. After all, they already faced terrible sanctions, which is why they gave up their nuclear program and agreed to a hugely invasive inspection regime.

But even more so, in order for that to work, the EU, Russia, and China would have to be on board with this. And so far, it is far from clear they will be. The EU is already saying they might protect firms hurt by US sanctions, which they absolutely should. US leadership doesn’t mean anything if we violate our agreements and then demand our allies support us.

And Russia and China? Please. Russia’s whole goal is to make this a post-US world, and separating us from Europe is a big part of that. Trump and Pompeo just handed them a huge gift. China isn’t trying to separate us, as much as make themselves far more relevant, and our rush toward empurpled irrelevance is extremely helpful.

But beside the unreality of his claims, it was Pompeo’s demand that really showed just what kind of people the administration is. I’m going to paste them in full.

1. Declare to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) a full account of the prior military dimensions of its nuclear programme and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity.

2. Stop enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing, including closing its heavy water reactor.
3. Provide the IAEA with unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country.
4. End its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt further launching or development of nuclear-capable missile systems.
5. Release all US citizens as well as citizens of US partners and allies.
6. End support to Middle East “terrorist” groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
7. Respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi government and permit the disarming, demobilisation and reintegration of Shia militias.
8. End its military support for the Houthi rebels and work towards a peaceful, political settlement in Yemen.
9. Withdraw all forces under Iran’s command throughout the entirety of Syria.
10. End support for the Taliban and other “terrorists” in Afghanistan and the region and cease harbouring senior al-Qaeda leaders.
11. End the Islamic Revolutionary Guard corps-linked Quds Force’s support for “terrorists” and “militant” partners around the world.
12. End its threatening behaviour against its neighbours, many of whom are US allies, including its threats to destroy Israel and its firing of missiles at Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and threats to international shipping and destructive cyberattacks.

Some of these are extremely worthy. Some are insane (give up even their nuclear energy program?). Some are wildly hypocritical, like the demand to stop supporting the Houthis while we’re arming the Sauds in their genocidal war. It’s not that it is unworthy, but it is not exactly an ask backed by any moral authority.

But the point-by-point isn’t as important as the project taken as a whole. In essence, they insist that Iran stop trying to be a power in the Middle East. This isn’t just hyopcritical; it is colonial. It is demanding that Iran go back before the revolution, when they were a vassal of the west. It is demanding that the Middle East be ruled by America, who gets to decide who is the power and who isn’t.

I can’t state how wildly self-defeating this is, not just in Iran, but in the broader Middle East (Gulf Arab states not included). I talked about why a while ago, but think it is important to re-up.

It’s madness and fallacy to think that the Iranian regime, or really, any post-Shah Iranian government, would enter into any agreement that lessens their regional power and increases that of the West. To believe that is to have zero historical understanding, of the near or the distant past.

The Iranian revolution wasn’t about Islam, or not entirely. There was a mix of anti-imperialist leftists, communists, other various secularists, religious types who didn’t want clerical rule (which remember, is what Khomeini first promised) and non-ideological nationalists who were just tired of western interference.

Western Europe and Russia had eclipsed Persian power in the region in the late 1800s, but it wasn’t until oil that the West really started controlling what was happening in Iran. Lopsided deals with venal flunkies gave England and then America a dominant role in the expropriation of Iranian resources. Shahs got rich, the west got rich, and most Iranians stayed poor. The same thing happened in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Western colonialism in the Middle East was a 20th-century phenomenon, which in our lifetime seems like all of eternity, but was really a blip. It was a terrible one, from the perspective of the inhabitants, of course. It was dirty and condescending and venal and greedy and grubbing. It was literally crude. Khomeini wasn’t just deposing a shah for the sake of Islam: he was kicking out the west for the sake of Iran.

That’s the heart of this. Iran, after a low and brutal, but historically brief, interregnum, is trying to reassert itself in a changing and fluid Middle East, still reeling from the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the perversions of 20th-century colonialism and nationalism.

To demand that they shouldn’t do this is breathtakingly arrogant and essentially colonialist. It’s saying to these dirty Persians that they should probably do what we want or else it would be a shame if we had to destroy your country. Grovel, or be brought low. One way or the other, on your knees.

The stupidity and venality of this is overwhelming. It brings us back to the days where we’d sign treaty after treaty with native nations, and then break them, running roughshod over their land, simply because we could. Because we had the power.

It’s no different. After treaty-breaking our way across the continent, we expanded worldwide, treating distant locals the way we treated the nations in this land. In the last generation, the world sort of accepted that this wasn’t the way to do things, that smaller countries had rights as well.

The US never really believed that, but certainly paid tribute to virtue (Russia was more or less the same, minus the tribute). This is nothing but the bad old days again. To assume that Iran will accept this is madness. To think that they should is arrogance. To think that they will, in the age of Trump, an ascendant China, and a swaggering Russia, is blindness.

When the eventual history of this dumb and wretched is eventually written, this tweet could be one that children are forced to memorize, from a stone desk in their cave-school in the Nü-Barrens.

There’s a lot going on here, but the basic story is this: when the FBI found out about the extensive role that Russia was (ultimately successfully) attempting to play in our election, and the inordinate number of ties and meetings between Russia and the Trump campaign, they wanted to look into it. Seems reasonable, to me.

One thing they did was ask an intermediary to talk to several Trump campaign officials, your various Pages and Papadodoli. This intermediary would then report back to the FBI. Again, pretty basic stuff, when investigating criminality. Indeed, this would seem to be the bare minimum the FBI can do.

Of course, now that this is public knowledge, thanks to extraordinary leaks from quisling par excellence Devin Nunes, it has mutated into the FBI “infiltrating or surveilling” the campaign, which is only half accurate, for “Political Purposes”, which is nonsense.

The reason it is nonsense is basic common sense. This has been pointed out by probably millions of people, but the FBI, under the Higherly Loyal leadership of James Comey, slow-walked any Trump investigation to avoid even the merest hint of politics, even planting false stories in the Times about how there was no investigation, which was patently false. This is actually ok, or would have been, had they not made a huge show out of looking at some emails found because Anthony Weiner had to sext teenagers, and no, I will never ever get over this.

So, if you wanted to allege an FBI conspiracy to derail the Trump campaign, it was basically this: 1) Investigate and infiltrate; 2) find damning details of meetings and Russian interference; 3) alert the President, who said nothing; 4) tell the world there is no investigations; 5) ?; 6) win!

(This timeline ignores Mitch McConnell refusing to release a bipartisan statement telling Russia to back off, one the many reasons he’s the worst, but this timeline isn’t about Republican abetting, just baffling FBI conspiracies.)

Obviously, it is nonsense, but despite–or rather, because–of that, it is an absolute article of faith with the President, his surrounders, most elected Republicans, and the whole right wing machine. That’s why this tweet is so ominous. We don’t just have the normal absolutely insane situation of the President tweeting out idiot conspiracies. He’s now demanding that the Justice Department investigate itself.

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As news and images exploded out from Gaza yesterday morning, as death counts increased, and the idea that Israeli soldiers opened indiscriminate live-fire on mostly-unarmed protestors became rooted in whatever passes for a public consciousness these days, a sort of counter-narrative began to take place. These protestors, massed against the border, were Hamas operatives. There was some talk of them being paid by Hamas, but the right wing in America and Israel believed, en masse, that these people were at best being manipulated by Hamas and used as human shields in a propaganda war.

Now, it’s not that these fabulists had no point at all: Hamas has never been above sacrificing Palestinians. And the protestors weren’t strictly angry about the move of the US embassy per se, but rather against the occupation as a whole. And it is clear that Hamas certainly encouraged people to mass at the border.

But still: think about it. Think of how little you have to care about Palestinians to think that they’d throw their lives away simply because Hamas said to. Think about how much you’d have to dismiss the daily cruelty and, ultimately, the pointless confinement of their lives. Think about the deep cynicism and reflexive denial you’d have to live in to pretend that there could be no legitimate reasons for a punished and trapped people to be angry.

And that’s when you realize that yesterday represented a kind of culmination, growing for years. The racism and religious bigotry that has been growing and ultimately consuming the GOP has found a full-throated partner in Netanyahu’s Likud, which has dropped even the pretense of peace, and even the illusion of recognizing Palestinian humanity.

The grotesque spectacle of the corrupt and terminally stupid US President sending the smiling emptiness of his daughter and the hollow absurdity of his son-in-law to open an embassy and close the door on any productive US role in the Middle East, to be surrounded and serenaded by bigots and religious hucksters, while a few miles away dozens were killed, is that final fusion.

It’s where the GOP’s ravening viciousness and absolute lack of empathy combined perfectly with the reckless hatreds of Trumpism and the cynical bloody-mindedness of Bibisim. They have been moving together for years, and they met fully and finally on Monday, the ting of clinking glasses drowning out the shrieks and the sound of rivening flesh below.

Ferguson and the Intifada

An oppressed minority has enough, and protests against their oppressors. Years–generations–of systemic abuse come to a head in clashes that turn violent. Official policy is to treat them as hostile, assume the worst, and use the behavior of any bad actor to engage in swift, disproportionate punishment.

You saw the subhead of this section, so you understand the parallels here. The protests in Ferguson in 2014 came from a defining incident, the shooting of Mike Brown and the decision not to prosecute Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed him. Immediately, a country already on edge after race-baiting demagogues used the fact of a black President to sow even more fear and division split apart.

The conversation quickly turned from the weight of Ferguson’s history (and that of the entire US) to whether or not Mike Brown deserved it.

In the hot summer of 2016, with Donald Trump stoking racial hatred at every raucous, adoring rally, we turned to another killing, in Charlotte, of Keith Scott. I wrote that maybe Scott had a gun or was a bad dude, but that wasn’t the issue.

The problem then is that these normal suspects will use any potential flaws in his character to gloss over the real issue, which isn’t just police violence, but the culture from which it springs. Tongues will be clucked over the defense of the dubious, and the question will be not “why are they angry”, but “how dare they be so angry. This one guy wasn’t a saint!”

It’s the normal dodge– that Mike Brown may have committed petty larceny means the sins of Ferguson don’t count, and that no one should have been mad. History is erased by a couple of cheap cigars.

That’s what has happened in Gaza as well. There’s no question that Hamas is a cruel sort of government, and that surely some of the people who went to protest wanted violence. But that we say, blithely, that they were “protesting at the border” is a benign way to describe the situation. They were at the fence that circumscribes their life, that leaves them in a wrecked and punished enclave, where they are trapped by Israel, and trapped with Hamas.

But none of that matters. The whole goal of the GOP has stopped even trying to understand why people might be upset over hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and the War on Drugs and police brutality. A whole campaign, and arguably an entire Presidency, was based around saying mean things about Black Lives Matter and getting performatively angry about football players kneeling.

That’s not just Trumpism, but he was the snarling completion of the GOP’s transformation, and certainly accelerated it and liberated bigots from using code words anymore. And he decided, without any hesitation (or really any thought) that he’d overturn decades of US foreign policy regarding the Palestinians, and be entirely unconcerned with their national aspirations of even basic humanity.

Again, though, Trump was the culmination of this. Over the last decade, the GOP accepted that Bibi’s particularly cruel and inward version of Likudism wasn’t merely cool, but was the avatar of Israel. That there was no Israel other than Bibi. And Bibi himself, in his rhetoric and cynicism and bigotry, was essentially, or even quintessentially, a Republican. They both decided whose lives were the only ones that mattered.

There is a common denominator between Mike Pence going to an NFL game just to walk out when black players demonstrated that their basic human dignity and lives were worth more than a tuneless poem, and Nikki Haley walking out today when a representative from Gaza rose to speak about the slaughter of his people. They both showed exactly how they felt about the wrong people claiming their humanity.

(The connection between the GOP and Israel is pretty complex, as the Republicans have been more of less taken over my apocalyptic Christians, who despise Islam and therefore love Bibi. It’s a marriage partly of convenience, as these Christians have no love for Jews in any real sense, but it is mostly a marriage of true love, based on mutual hatred.)

Foreign Policy by Politics and Personality

There’s another way that the United States and Israel are in the same trough of historical madness: they are being shaped entirely by the malignant personalities of their heads of state. Those personalities manifest themselves in different ways, of course, but there are parallels that go beyond their racism.

I used to think that Bibi had no ideology other than his own political career, and he was willing to bend as far to the right as possible to create coalitions that would keep him there. I don’t think I was wrong, but I think he calcified into the grotesquerie he always presented himself as. You don’t cater for years to Avigdor Lieberman without eventually believing your own wretched posturing.

But still, the raw cynicism with which he managed his career posioned everything in Israeli politics and its foreign policy. Piece by piece, in order to save his own skin, he destroyed first the possibility of a two-state solution and then even any idea of it. He destroyed hope, and in doing so, he further coarsened Israel. The country has largely washed its hands not just of the national aspirations of Palestinians, but their very humanity.

This was also made possible by the fervent embrace in which he was wrapped by the GOP, who had his back, and who gave him pride of place even over the United States President. Until, of course, that President was Trump, who either through laziness or meanness, tied his foreign policy entirely to Bibism, starting with the JCPOA (which, was always have to remind ourselves, is supported by the Israeli intelligence services, but not Bibi).

Trump’s attitude toward Israel was, by any logical stance, weird. It’s not just that he is willing to give them whatever he wants, and it’s not that he really has no principled reason to support them. It’s that he really doesn’t care, which is why he turned over all his policy to Jared Kushner, who knew nothing.

Our policy is then dominated by Trump’s laziness and ignorance and bigotry, by his idea that he really should listen to Bibi, by his addiction to the strange passions of Fox News, and by his absolute lack of concern for anyone who can’t fete him with red carpets and orbs.

That’s why he moved the Embassy. It is true that many Democrats supported this as well- Chuck Schumer, who is entirely inexcusable, congratulated Trump for doing so. It’s very true that not giving the Palestinians a real chance was bipartisan, but never to this degree. Since the first Bush administration, the idea that the Palestinians had rights was a given.

Moving the Embassy was never done by a Democrat, or a Republican before the zombie fungues took full control of the GOP brain, because everyone recognized that if we wanted any chance of being a trusted broker, we couldn’t honor the Occupation. We could play footsie with it, we could recognize it de facto, but a de jure acceptance of Israeli domination over Jerusalem? That was madness.

Well, it’s madness that the right wing likes. It sticks it to the Palestinians, and gives Bibi a boost. It’s a main cause of Fox News. They’ve been telling Trump to do this for years. And he wants to make them happy. He lives for them to say he was sure tough and he stuck it to the libs.

And so he made a catastrophic move, because that’s who he is. And that’s what our politics are now. That’s also the heart of our international relations.

White Supranationalism Over All

This was happening at the same time as the top picture

As we’ve argued on this blog, many times, putting Jared Kushner in charge of Middle East peace is one of the most insulting aspects of Trumpism. Even if he’s a bright guy, and that shouldn’t be stipulated as a fact, he knew nothing about the Middle East.

That’s sort of why it was maddening that he and Ivanka, who is a worthless cover for the admin’s depredations, were there dedicating the Embassy in the first place. This was a monumental event, whether you thought it was Brave and Bold or catastrophic. It wasn’t a photo op for a jumped-up empowerment guru and the security-clearance-denied rich kid she married.

But it was doubly maddening when you consider the violence that was happening while they cheered and grinned and celebrated. The contrast itself was sickening; that the Administration literally doesn’t care enough about a razor-edge situation to send anyone competent puts it in stark relief: they just don’t consider Palestinians to be people.

In his rare remarks, Kushner gave boilerplate platitudes about peace, the possibility of which’s death he was overseeing, but then improvised and let us know exactly what he thought about Palestinians.

“As we have seen from the protests of the last month and even today, those provoking violence are part of the problem and not part of the solution,” he said.

That’s really all you need to know about this administration, about the GOP, about Bibi, and about the white supranationalism that is overtaking so much of the globe. You see it in the cruelty shown Syrian refugees in Europe (especially, though not exclusively, in Eastern Europe). You see it in how we treat refugees of all stripes, and how the controlling party treats any minority. Cruelty isn’t the outcome: it’s the entire goal.

It’s the idea that the Other has to be completely dehumanized, that their aspirations treated as worthless, that any violence they commit is inexcusable, and that violence against them is justified, acceptable, and praise-worthy.

That’s Bibism. That’s Trumpism. That’s the GOP. And at the end, that’s America.