The cycle of empires

It is not as if President Macron and his administration needed a new crisis to add to the turmoil of his second term in power. Unlike Mali or Burkina Faso, where French troops were bluntly asked to leave by military juntas, Mayotte is in effect a full-fledged French department. The reminiscence of a vast empire that has almost entirely vanished. All empires fade in their respective historical time frames.

Some finished abruptly, like the Ottoman empire in the immediate aftermath of World War I when the imperial victors (the United Kingdom and France) dismantled it through the Syke-Picot secretive 1916 treaty that determined their respective colonial spoils of war in the entire Middle-East. Some empires, like the British and French empires in more recent times, face a slow erosion following the flux of struggles for self determination and finally independence of indigenous populations from colonial powers.

Even in vanishing empires struggle against colonialism continues

In the giant geopolitical turmoils of post World War II some anti-imperialist leaders emerged. One of them was the Indonesian revolutionary figure Sukarno, who headed the struggle of Indonesia’s independence from the Dutch colonial power. In a statement that has a universal appeal, Sukarno wrote: “I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined, that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the plaything of one small corner of the world.”

Mayotte a mini-Algeria in the making for Macron?

First of all, some brief historical elements are necessary here. The two small islands of Mayotte are part of the Comoros Archipelago. The Comoros were first populated by migrants from East Africa, then invaded by Arabs during the 15th century. The Arabs brought Islam to the Comoros, and 600 years later Islam remains by far the dominant religion. The Mahorais in Mayotte are the local and legal population; a large majority are proud to be French, and many consider the undocumented Comorans migrants to be interlopers who should be kicked out, as they feel their standards of living is under assault.

In many ways, even though the two populations, Mahorais on one side and Comorans on the other, are racially and religiously quasi identical, it is as if the Mahorais are the privileged white colonists, which in Algeria were called Pieds Noirs, and the Comorans are Mayotte’s equivalent of the oppressed Arab population. This indicates that the economic gap between groups of people struggling for their rights to the same land matter more than cultural, racial, or religious divides.

In this case, it is a struggle between the poor, the Mahorais, and the destitute who are the freshly arrived undocumented Comorans. There is nothing better than reducing the size of the pie to turn vicious the fights at the family table! Since the 1974 referendum, which kept Mayotte as a French territory, with two-thirds of Mahorais voting in favor, France has not done enough for its citizens in Mayotte. It has also neglected to provide financial assistance to the Comoros, which would have avoided the large undocumented migrants flux. It has been pretty much 50 years of bad policies, but mostly neglect towards Mayotte from one Paris administration after another.

Forget Operation Wuambush (take back) instead fight poverty

Operation Wuambush is headed by France’s Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin. The name is highly symbolic as it implies a reconquest after an invasion. The muscle of the cleaning, or pacification, operation involves 2,000 Gendarmes and the French riot police, CRS. The ill-advised plan appears to be simple: it consists of the demolition of countless shantitowns, and the expulsion, manu militari, of the undocumented migrants to the Comoros. But, there is a huge problem for the Macron administration and Mr. Darmanin.

According to a very official Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE), if an official census of 2017 established the legal population of Mayotte at 256,500, in reality, considering that more than 50 percent are undocumented migrants, and therefore not registered, the real number of Mayotte’s booming population could be as high as 500,000. The two communities, by and large, do not get along.

To grasp fully the explosive nature of the Mayotte situation, some key figures are needed. The birth rate in Mayotte is extremely high: in 2021 it was 4.6 children per woman. Furthermore, half of the population is below 18-years-old. Yet more disturbing official data from INSEE: in Mayotte, an astounding four in ten residences are precarious dwellings made of scavenged materials such as pieces of plywood and corrugated metal sheets; three out of ten habitations lack running water; in 2022 Mayotte’s unemployment rate was 34 percent; last but not least, in 2018, 77 percent of the population was living below France’s poverty level.

Darmanin’s naked ambitions?

One must wonder: why this repressive anti-migrant operation, and why now, while in France proper a deep political turmoil is at play in the aftermath of the extremely unpopular retirement reforms? Unless it is a diversion tactic, the timing of it seems completely off. Could the operation of pacification of Mayotte be a stepping stone for Mr Darmanin’s own political ambitions?

Many political insiders in France have said that the ambitious Interior Minister has his eyes on the job of current Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne. It might also be a sign of bigger goals for him down the line, and why not the presidency of France? Spearheading this policing operation could boost Darmanin’s appeal to the anti-immigration xenophobic electorate of Marine Le Pen’s party, which is substantial.

He has certainly established himself as a tough law-and-order proponent, modeling his persona to that of Nicolas Sarkozy who, by the way, started his political career as Jacques Chirac’s Minister of the Interior. As the Minister of the Interior, the advantage of heading France’s vast security apparatus is that you know where the skeletons are buried.

At the last presidential election’s second round in 2022, Marine Le Pen obtained almost 60 percent of the vote in France’s overseas territories. This vote, considering that Le Pen’s party is rooted in a culture of nationalism and xenophobia, is sociologically highly disturbing as it is completely detached from history in places that have been so deeply marked by the memory and collective pain of slavery and colonialism.

More specifically, in Mayotte during the 2022 French presidential election, Marine Le Pen obtained 43 percent in the first round, against 24 percent for Jean-Luc Melenchon of the left party La France Insoumise, and 17 percent for Emanuel Macron. During the second round, which opposed Macron to Le Pen, Marine Le Pen garnered 59 percent of the vote versus 41 percent for Macron. Needless to say her edge and appeal to a majority of Mayotte’s electorate was based on her anti-immigration Trumpist-like nationalist and populist agenda.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who fought in France’s colonial wars first in Indochina and then Algeria, was echoing and embracing the Algerie Francaise! battlecry of French colonists. By contrast to his daughter, Le Pen was less than welcome in the overseas territories when he was politically active. In fact he was banned from landing in Martinique by the local authorities.

Despite what Mr. Macron and Mr. Darmanin, or other people in their fancy offices in Paris, think and plot, the time of France-Afrique is long gone. Mahorais and Comorans are brothers and sisters. In faith, race and unfortunately poverty they must learn how to get along and manage their own conflicts without becoming the instruments of French politicians of various stripes. A comprehensive dialogue must open up between all the citizens of the Comoros archipelago which, like it or not, includes Mayotte.

While it is the most far-right anti-migrant Mahorais that have formed quasi vigilante groups to attack Comorans and torched their makeshift homes, the government of the Comoros is not blame free. Their refusal to take back their citizens who have migrated to Mayotte could also be a way to modify Mayotte’s demographics in the medium term. Migrants can be easily weaponized, like Qaddafi did in Libya, or Erdogan did in Turkey with Syrian refugees, to blackmail the European Union. Soon having (right now it is 50 percent) more Comorans on the island than Mahorais could validate their claim that the island, despite the 1974 referendum, belongs to the Comoros and not to France.

Mayotte is a case study not only in neocolonialism, but also in the global migration crisis, as it illustrates that the world at large will have to absorb and manage, in a non-repressive human way if at all possible, the flow and cost of massive migration due to the increasing catastrophic impact of climate collapse.

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photograph one by David Stanley; photographs three, four, five and nine by Jean-Pierre Dalbera; photograph six by Bernard Pez; photograph eight from the archive of IWRM AIO SIDS; and photograph eleven by Toni Serna Rossello.

The birth of a bipolar world order?

Since 2014, which marked the first Russian intervention in Ukraine, a new global geopolitical dynamic has amplified under conflicting impulses. The areas of direct, or more often proxy conflicts, have been in many senses contained with some sort of cynical pressure-cooker mechanism. If empires always seek hegemony, sane geopolitics imply balance to avoid slipping into World War scenarios. We have presently reached a Cold War-like balance between two blocks: the West and their satellites on one side, against BRICS nations and their affiliates on the other side. In the best case scenario, this new cold war could give birth to a lasting bipolar world order: curiously enough, following pretty closely Orwell’s cartography of Oceania & Eurasia.

The West is defined by the US empire and its vassals

The two axes of powers must be explained more precisely. On one side “the West” includes US, UK, EU, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia. The command headquarters of this imperial structure are of course located in the United States of America. The empire’s military muscle is NATO. As for the junior members such as the UK, European Union and Japan, they are, despite some claims of the contrary the vassals of big Uncle Sam.

One factor could be viewed as a miscalculation by Vladimir Putin. In many ways his decision last year to start a military operation in Ukraine had a paradoxical effect. The intervention was an attempt by Russia to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO & the EU, but this has failed as Western military gears as well as direct assistance have poured in. Just like in Afghanistan in the 1980’s Russia was effectively sucked into a West proxy war. Meanwhile, NATO has found a new raison d’etre with Finland now officially a member and Sweden soon also to become one. The general paranoia used in Western media to depict Putin as the ultimate bogeyman has worked wonders on Europe’s public opinion.

BRICS & affiliates

On the other side it is more complex as China’s dominance is more subdued than that of the US. Besides the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China & South-Africa, other nations are gravitating into the same geopolitical orbit: notably Iran, Venezuela and African countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso. While China is clearly the biggest power within BRICS, the other two major players, which are Russia and India, also are heavyweights on an overall geopolitical and economic scale.

Russia holds vast reserves of energy products, such as gas and oil, and since the European sanctions has quickly worked on redirecting its energy production both towards China and India. India, which has become the most populous country on Earth, has just like China a considerable manufacturing power as well as a huge internal market for products and services. In other words, neither China nor India have to rely mainly on exports to sustain their respective economic growth.

Non-alignment is dead

The concept of non-alignment in a multipolar world, dear to the likes of Tito and de Gaulle, has unfortunately become a geopolitical faux pas at best, or a risky behavior for a small state wanting to stay independent at worst. Because of a lack of political will and leadership, the European Union has basically capitulated from asserting itself as a third block to become a provincial entity of the US empire. The notion of true non-alignment might have run its course in this new bipolar order.

As matter of fact, one of the Ukraine war’s major side effects has been to speed up the process of obedient realignment of the EU to the US. European leaders with their respective media propaganda divisions (either state or corporate controlled) have managed to convince the bulk of their public opinion that the ogre Vladimir Putin and Russia had to be defeated in Ukraine as if the hordes from a memory of the Red Army were about to invade Europe. The Ukraine war has been sold in Europe as a war of necessity to counter an existential threat that was never really there. Public opinion largely bought it, and the financial rewards are pouring into the coffers of the military-industrial complex, as well as US and Qatari energy businesses of natural gas liquefaction, to replace the well-organized Russian gas supply Europe used to get before the sanctions against Russia.

Ukraine war cannot be won on the battle fields

Despite what most people are lead to believe in the West, a military victory by Ukrainian forces, even with full logistic support from NATO in equipment and training is quasi impossible. After all, a lesson should be learned from Afghanistan where the Taliban managed to defeat the mighty alliance. If the EU and the United States cared for the welfare of Ukrainians, they would come to the realization that only a diplomatic solution can resolve the crisis. A sine qua non condition of diplomacy is that it requires concessions on all sides.

For example, let’s take the case of Crimea. It has a complex history. During the 15th century Crimea was under control of the Ottoman Empire. In 1783, the Russian Empire of Tsarina Catherine the Great annexed Crimea after a conflict with Turkey. Lastly, under the authority of Nikita Khrushchev, the USSR gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Therefore, Crimea was Russian for 171 years while it was Ukrainian for only 60 years. The weight of history, in this case, should tilt the balance in favor of Russia.

Military-industrial complex Uber Alles

Wars have always been capitalism‘s best friend. Ultimately they are seldom about the lofty notions of patriotism but systematically about profits. Ukraine’s Western proxy adventure is no exception. As matter of fact, it has been a gargantuan bonanza for the global military-industrial complex and its stockholder war profiteers. Case in point: since Russia started its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has spent $30 billion in military equipment which was shipped to Ukraine. This is according to the US Department of Defense.

For its part the European Union is planning a 74 billion Euros increase in military spending within three years. This trend of huge increase in military spending affects all the EU 27 members, as they are allocating bigger shares of their respective GDPs to this weapons race. In December 2022, the European Defense Agency proudly announced that EU defense spending had surpassed 200 billion Euros for the first time in the union’s history. What an accomplishment!

Needless to say, military-industrial consortium and their unscrupulous stockholders have collected huge dividends from the death and destruction business. Stocks in the so-called aerospace & defense area of the market have been incredibly profitable for investors and are therefore in high demand. On average, most defense-company stocks have seen their values increase by 25 to 30 percent since February 2022.

Naturally, in terms of military spending, the United States represents the lions’ share with a whopping 38 percent of the global military spending. It is an astronomical $800 billion a year or 3.1 percent of the US GDP. Unfortunately other major powers are catching up. In second place comes China with $293 billion or 1.7 percent of its GDP; then India with $76.6 billion; the UK with 68.4 billion; Russia with $65.9 billion or 3.1 percent of GDP; France and Germany with $56 billion each; and Japan with $54 billion. In France, despite a very concerning debt, the Macron administration has announced that 413 billion Euros will be spent on the military between 2024 and 2030.

Taiwan: the Ukraine of the far-east?

With Russia sucked into what can be called a military quagmire in Ukraine, one has to wonder if the Oceania empire, with its Washington nevralgic center, would not indeed want to take advantage or even provoke a Chinese move to take over Taiwan, in accordance to the One-China precept. This could create a Ukrainian-like situation for China in Taiwan. Instead of having the obedient EU to absorb part of the cost in the West, in the Pacific it could be US vassals such as Japan, South-Korea and Australia that could get involved into a proxy war with China, and therefore increase their military spending in US equipment. Trillion of dollars would be wasted in resources to allow the chess masters of geopolitics to keep playing their mindless criminal games. Everywhere, the brutal Russian roulette folly of capitalism, either state or corporate, would thrive while all populations suffer.

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of “The Orwellian Empire.” Photographs one, three, four, five and eleven from the archive of UNDP; Photographs two, eight and ten from the archive of NATO; photograph six by Alisdare Hickson; photograph nine by Photography Montreal: and photograph seven from the archive of EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid.

President Macron is not a king but a pawn of global finance

The current tenant of the Elysee Palace has been called by NUPES, the left coalition opposition in France, a President-King. To do so is to give him a bigger role and more power than what he has. In reality, Macron is just one of the numerous figure heads of the billionaire class that meets in Davos once a year. The power resides there, concentrated, often anonymous and always brutal in a masquerade of do-gooders. In Davos, the financial Masters of the Universe, posturing as philanthropists, have been in reality jealously protecting the complex Gordian Knot that is global capitalism. Perhaps France’s radical protesters, in their quasi insurrection form, are trying to emulate Alexander the Great by putting this giant Gordian Knot to the sword!

Macronie’s authoritarian fascist traits

To suppress and repress strikes and protests, Macron’s government has adopted a strategy of brutal repression, exercised by his Robocop Praetorian Guards, which are mainly composed of riot police from the CRS and the BRAV-M. Of course, Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne’s government justifies the alarming crescendo in police violence against retirement reform protesters and more recently against Green radical activists in Deux Sevres by saying that the State violence protect people and property from dangerous rioters.

This is the Law & Order above all motto: common grounds, with various degrees of brutality, to all authoritarian and fascist regimes. By following this dangerous strategy, Macron’s associates and sponsors have surely made the calculation that sooner of later they should be able to flip the proverbial silent majority in France, and by doing so reduce the current support for the protests, which is at around 63 percent of the overall population, and at an astronomical 90 percent of the active workers.

This strategy of “chose our Republican order” instead of the chaos from the populace, is unlikely to work. Further, it is a very dangerous political game. In fact, the chaos comes from the inability of the government to get a pulse of France’s public opinion. Besides, violence is a vicious circle, and the extreme violence exercised by units like the BRAV-M or the CRS on protesters, in the name of the Republic, is fueling violent reactions from the more radical elements of the protests.

Under the former Rothschild banker’s administration, France has become a province of the global Orwellian Empire. In this Orwellian construct where war is peace and lies are truth, French police forces, who are supposed to be agents for public peace (Guardiens de la Paix) and for order (Force de l’Ordre) are now, de facto, vectors of chaos, sternly criticized and even condemned by worldwide public opinion.

On his deathbed, George Orwell gave a TV interview to the BBC. What is said was chilling, and it applies to France’s turmoil: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stumping on a human face forever. The moral to be drawn from this nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen! It depends on you!”

The Prince’s Consigliere

Every prince has his Machiavelli. In the case of Macron his name is Alexis Kohler. Like all Consiglieres, Kohler is Macron’s number one adviser. He is also the palace gatekeeper, and ultimately the only one who controls access to the president. According to several political insiders, Kohler was the one absolutely adamant about the imperative of the unpopular retirement reform. Kholer, the man in the shadow running the Macronie, apparently picked Elizabeth Borne as prime minister. According to a former Macron adviser who made this statement anonymously: ” Emmanuel Macron has never governed so isolated. The core of his actions has always been elaborated with Alexis Kohler. But they are few people left to balance the duo, bring other points of view, and even less contradiction.”

Kohler just like Macron is an elitist who has contempt for ordinary French people and even elected officials. Both are technocrats and share a sort of arrogant petulance, an aspiration to modernity, which no longer charms French people. Jupiter-want-to-be has also a knack for provocation, a special talent to pour gasoline on an open flame. One of the little statements that got protesters even more enraged is what he said a few days ago: “La foule, quelle qu’elle soit, n’a pas de legitimite face au peuple qui s’exprime souverain a travers ses elus.” (The populace, whomever they are, have no legitimacy compared to the people who express their sovereignty through their elected officials). One can easily imagine Alexis Kohler Consiglieri /Machiavelli whisper to his Prince some awful Machiavelli advice such as: “Power is the pivot on which everything hinges. He who has the power is always right. The weaker is always wrong.”

Unfortunately for Kohler and Macron, and fortunately for France, the advices of Machiavelli in “The Prince” do not apply in a country with a rich history of serious revolutions. No, France cannot be run like a start up company or be managed like a large hedge fund. No, seeking advice from the CEO of Black Rock or the consulting firm McKinsey should have been absolutely out of the question. One cannot behave like a banker and have at the same time aspirations to be considered a statesman. The interests of the French do not meet with those of the CAC 40, Wall Street or Goldman Sacks. Emmanuel Macron is perceived as the president of the rich, and that is precisely what he is. It is utterly obscene that France’s top five billionaires have more wealth than 27 million French citizens! No wonder people who can barely make ends meet are mad! This wealth concentration is likely higher than the one in France circa 1789. At some point, something will have to give. It happened before. This time, it could be now!

Potential solutions for France’s political turmoil

The government of Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne has in reality very few ways out of the current turmoil. The easy way out for the administration would be, of course, to withdraw the law or at least postpone it, but France’s Jupiter, drunk with power, has dug his heels deep like a capricious and ill tempered child. He has stubbornly refused to pull out his retirement reform law despite the massive protests. It would be wise to reconsider, but he won’t as he would lose face in the battle of the will he has engaged in with a majority of French citizens.

At the moment, if the retirement law is implemented, governing the country will be basically an impossible task. The best options to calm things down are drastic. Firstly, it could be a dissolution of the National Assembly to organize new parliamentary elections. Gains would likely be made by the NUPES & Marine Le Pen‘s RN. In such a case there would be two options for prime minister, either Jean-Luc Melenchon or Marine Le Pen. After all, this type of power sharing wouldn’t be the first time during the Fifth Republic. Francois Mitterrand lost a parliamentary election while president, he had to pick Jacques Chirac, from the opposition, as his prime minister. Then it was Chirac’s turn to lose an election and he picked socialist Lionel Jospin. Secondly, as an alternative to calling for new elections, the French government could organize a referendum without much delay.

Perfect storm in Macronistan

Many factors play in favor of the retirement reform strikers and protesters. This has become completely beyond the unpopular reform, as it is only the tip of the iceberg of France social turmoil. It is now a perfect storm for capitalism and the billionaire class that Macron represents. A lot of factors play in favor of radical French protesters who might want to pursue a toppling of the Macron government.

Other potential tipping points are: double digit inflation on food items; the fact that 10 million people in France have to rely on food banks to eat; a remarkable growth in the awareness of climate collapse; the worldwide banking crisis, which started at Silicon Valley Bank and then spread to Credit Suisse and more recently hit Deutsche Bank. This will not help Macron and his little financial wizard friends to sell the French people on the notion of how smart they are and that “banks and financial markets are on solid ground.”

COVID, war in Ukraine and all that jazz

As matter of fact, all of it, everywhere is on shaky ground. It should obviously make citizens in the West wonder about the validity of bleeding public finances to buy weapons for Ukraine in a war that Ukrainians cannot possibly win. With the COVID crisis and now Ukraine, governments in the EU and US thought that they had beaten their respective populations’ will into submission through the manipulation of fear, respectively of a virus and of autocrat Vladimir Putin. If COVID was a golden goose for the biotech industry, the war in Ukraine is a money tree, more like a forest, for the merchants of death of the global military-industrial complex either in the US, the EU, Russia, Iran and even China. All of them manufacturing weapons, all of them to blame for this infinite mayhem, waste of resources, and, of course, human lives.

The radical French protesters, and united trade union workers alike are moving heaven and Earth to break the mold fabricated to suit global capitalism’s perverse imperatives! With nothing to lose, they are standing strong! All the stress factors on global capitalism such as inflation, debt, banking meltdown and climate crisis events work in their favor as catalysts to shore up and fuel the protests, and this could mark the beginning of the end for a capitalist system in tatters!

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and nine by Jeanne Menjoulet; photograph eight by Nykaule; and photograph ten by Alisdare Hickson.

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Si ce n’est des couches de souvenirs innombrables

Stratifications invisibles et furtives

De l’empreinte magique du temps

Souvenirs fragiles et éphémères

Tels des chateaux de sable

Sous l’assaut des vagues et du vent

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Si ce n’est l’impossibilité de trouver

La paix dans l’oubli du silence

Telle une amnesie douce

Immuable sous le scalpel du regret

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Si ce n’est cette volonté humaine

Arrogante et malsaine d’être maître

De son destin

La mémoire collective est l’histoire

Au vu des calamités a l’horizon

On peut se demander

Si les peuples primitifs sans histoire

N’étaient pas plus heureux

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Si ce n’est l’impossibilité à vivre dans le present

Et ainsi à souffrir de l’anxiété du passé

Et surtout à celle d’un avenir fuyant

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Si ce n’est l’interdiction

De la joie inéfable du maintenant

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Si ce n’est trop souvent

Une comptabilité sordide des regrets et rancunes

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Sinon la folie morbide de penser

Que le sable et l’eau fluidite du temps

Se cueillent facilement comme des fruits succulents

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Sinon des petites pierres blanches

Alignées par une main invisible

Pour nous guider dans le labyrinthe de la vie

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Sinon des fils magiques nous reliant aux ancêtres

Qu’est donc la mémoire

Si ce n’est en même temps

Une terre familière et un monde inconnu

Editor’s Notes: Photograph one by Eugenio Azzola; photographs two and three by Hari K. Patibanda.

The days of the locusts have come. Nature is taking a deadly revenge on itself and us. In our instance, the swarming locusts that eat and destroy all living creatures in their paths, are ourselves, eight billion humans who have eaten, consumed, exploited and are in the process of committing matricide on the most generous parent: mother Earth. It is a self-imposed punishment, a collective suicide, the mindless destruction of our own life source. We are, indeed, the locusts.

We are the locusts

Some of us, the ones climate-change deniers call climate alarmists, saw the Dead End signs coming for quite some time. For more than a decade we were called prophets of doom and gloom for ringing the alarm of Dying by Two Degrees. But most didn’t, or couldn’t pay attention and listen, as they were trapped in the mindset paralysis of business as usual, or in the lunacy of denial of a human cause of climate collapse, expressed by statements such as, climate has always changed. Recently, while confronted with such a denier, torch bearer of such loony Godspell, I told him that climate has always changed as much as the earth is flat.

It’s funny how quickly things can change when a large portion of the northern hemisphere, especially arrogant Europe and North America have been baking in temperatures around or above 40 degrees Celsius (104 F). Wait! This is not supposed to happen to us; we are for the most part melanin challenged! We don’t deserve this, right during our sacrosanct summer holidays! It is our birthright as the main vectors of an industrial civilization, which is killing us all, to burn more fuel, simply for our enjoyment, in planes, boats and cars. Soon, the melanin challenged will receive a lesson in humility from the brown and black people of the global south. As extreme heat and deserts move north, the melanin challenged should learn the Tuaregs’ survival ways.

Everyone should see that all of it is going south, upside down and in absolute turmoil. Don’t deny it or make projections. No. We do not need any more studies by climatologists. It is not coming, it is already here! The stench of decomposing corpses, big and small, lingers about. At 47 degrees Celsius (117 F), birds drop dead from the sky. What we need is worldwide emergency mitigation to save what we can and whom we can: to build countless Noah’s arks for the climate collapse. The arks could be small subterranean cities under the wasteland scorched by the deadly sun. Those cities could possibly be connected by tunnels, or survivors more simply could rediscover cave dwelling like our ancestors. By then, drinkable water will be the most valuable commodity.

When the air is so hot and thick that innocent birds and flying insects, collateral damage of human follies, fall from the sky, you know that the stench of death has landed among us. It is announcing the coming of our own extinction. How can any human be so stupid as to think that the death of the entire ecosystem supporting us, being wild animals, or trees and plants, may be restored through technological fixes?

In life or death the blunt power of nature prevails over us. After almost two months of temperatures above 100 F and no rain, even mature trees like majestic sycamores or oaks suffer. Dead leaves cover the ground as if it is autumn. Old sycamores even shed their barks leaving their white trunks exposed to the brutal heat. Trees and animals are crying for help! The few of us who care try to help, mostly in vain. The toys of the techies have no power over any of it. No apps will miraculously shade the sun or bring the salvation of rain.

Modern human’s quasi worship of technology, and so called progress, since the industrial revolution of the mid-nineteen century, is what has triggered the explosion of this rage of the machine: the imperative to extract and burn fossil fuels, or consume everything like voracious beasts. Some 170 years of an abysmal race into this madness, and we have become the lobotomized half man and half machine cyborg of the Apocalypse.

One can wonder why we, as a species, have not set up a giant and global Marshal-like plan to mitigate the climate collapse that is unfolding in real time? Trillions of dollars could be diverted from military and fossil-fuel extraction spending. The reason is simple. All major world powers are in reality run by the industrial military, energy and tech complex, including Russia and China. Therefore, even with the prospect of global destruction for all, the promise of immense profit for very few still prevails. The time of the Apocalypse has come. It is here right now. We won’t have Jesus to come back for the Rapture or some generous billionaire comic book heroes to spirit us away to their space stations. The hell on Earth of extreme weather, droughts, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, famines and almost unlivable conditions will be our legacy to coming generations. The likely rule will be a survival of the fittest in brutal and primitive hunter and gatherer semi-nomadic tribal communities. The old, the frail, and the sick will not stand a chance.

Editor’s Notes: Photographs one, three, four, six, seven and eight by Gilbert Mercier. Photographs two and five by Dave Straven.

Mythology of humans’ natural impulse for empathy

Warfare has been a plague haunting the human species ever since our evolution to become Homo Sapiens, finally, around 300,000 years ago in Africa. Etymologically, homo means human and sapiens means wise or knowledgeable. One can see that in this 18th century anthropocentric characterization of our species, the notion of wisdom was highly overrated. What made our common Homo sapiens ancestors any wiser than the Neanderthals that they would eventually invade and annihilate? History is narrated by victors, therefore we were told that Homo sapiens were highly superior to the so-called brutal Neanderthals. It could be true in territorial ambitions, and some technological aspects, but it remains questionable in other area of social activity.

Ultimately, a taste for adventure and conquest is what drove Homo sapiens to expand their territories on Earth. It would be utterly naive to think that this progressive form of colonization was accomplished through peaceful means. No, unfortunately for our species, a propensity for aggression, for domination through warfare was always present in Homo sapiens DNA.

Despite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cornerstone idea that humans had a natural impulse to compassion and empathy, part of our being was always selfish, brutal and predatory. This inherent, and almost genetic, conflict explains the permanence of warfare in human history. The oscillations, both individually and collectively, between empathetic and sociopathic behaviors is what could be defined as our Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde conundrum. It is simultaneously, our collective human blessing and burden, and it has defined both the incredible successes and the colossal failures of humanity.

Wars of necessity or of choice: all wars are for profit

Warfare in the 20th century was rather simple compared to today’s predicaments. Either during World War I or World War II, nations had traditional alliances which were usually respected and recognized by treaties. Usually formal declarations of wars were issued before a military action -at the exception of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl-Harbor. The two wars were sold by leaders to their respective populations as wars of necessity. In both cases, they were still wars fought by conscripts, as professional soldiers, a euphemism for mercenaries, are usually not eager to become cannon fodder.

While the United States cautiously, one could say cowardly, stood on the sideline during World War I until 1917, the conflict unquestionably triggered the Russian revolution, as poor Russians conscripts refused to fight the tsar’s war. As Marxist ideas were quickly spreading elsewhere in Europe, many French soldiers refused to fight their German brothers for the sake of capitalism. Many conscripts then knew that the so-called war of necessity was a scheme of war for profit. At the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to pay an enormous amount to France, in gold, as war compensation. In the Middle East, in an even more substantial perennial spoils of war story, the two dominant empires of the time, the United Kingdom and France had grabbed for themselves the bulk of the Ottoman empire through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.

If you analyze the war of necessity versus war of choice, and correlation of war for profit during World War II, in the case of the United States, first you wonder what took the US so long to enter the war alongside their allies France and England? The answer is often murky, as many major US corporations such as Ford Motor and General Motors ,as well as policymakers such as Joe Kennedy (father of JFK), had either vested economic interests in Nazi Germany or were upfront in their support for Adolf Hitler.

Further, once the United States was attacked by Japan and finally committed to the European part of the conflict against Germany, a large part of Detroit’s manufacturing sector was converted to military purposes. In the United States, it is arguably more this massive war effort than FDR’s New Deal which turned the US economy into a juggernaut, in a dramatic recovery from the Great Depression, which the Wall Street crash of 1929 had started. Warfare writes human history using blood and tears for ink, but the merchants of death of the military-industrial complex and their financial market affiliates always profit handsomely.

If slavery or slave labor is the ideal structure for capitalism, any war, under any pretext, is the perfect business venture, as it provides a fast consumption of goods (weapons & ammunition), cheap labor force using the leverage of patriotism — defend the motherland or fatherland — and infinite money to rebuild once capitalism’s wars for profit have turned everything to ruins and ashes. After World War II, the US Marshall Plan was painted as some great altruistic venture, but in fact it justified a long-term occupation of Germany and incredibly lucrative contracts, some of them aimed at controlling West Germany’s economy and government.

Rise of conceptual wars: war on terror & war on Covid

If the wars of the 20th century were conventional as they either opposed sovereign nations or were in the context of imperial-colonial setback, like the French war in Indochina, Algeria’s independence war against France, some were specifically defined by the Cold War era, like the Korea war. From World War II at the Yalta conference, two new empires had emerged as dominant: the United States and the USSR. The world had then the predictability of this duality. The collapse of the Soviet Union altered this balance, but it took a bit more than a decade to make a quantum leap.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, an event, the September 11, 2001 attack, radically changed the dynamic, as it marked the start of the conceptual war on terror. Terror is an effect, an emotion. How can one possibly wage war against an emotion? However absurd conceptually, this turning point in history allowed more or less all governments worldwide to embark into surveillance, obsession for security and a crackdown on personal liberties. Using the shock and fear in the population, which followed the collapse of the New York City Twin Towers in the US, a form of police state was almost immediately born using new administrative branches of government like the Department of Homeland Security. We still live in the post 9/11 world, as that coercive apparatus keep dragging on.

Just like in standard, more conventional warfare, capitalism doesn’t create crises like 9/11, but seems always to find ways to benefit from it. In the war-on-terror era, a narrative also popular with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, the beneficiaries were and still are the global military-industrial complex, private security apparatus more like small private armies, and layers of police forces. How can one go wrong in terms of maximum profit?

In complete haste, and with a massive international support, using the trauma to influence worldwide public opinion, an attack on Afghanistan was launched by NATO’s invincible armada. Were the Taliban governing the country at the time responsible for 9/11? Not so. Their fault was to host the man who was arguably the architect of the attack: enemy-number-one Osama bin-Laden, of course. The fact that most of the pilots who flew the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were Saudi Arabian nationals was not even dismissed, it wasn’t even publicly considered by governments or the corporate controlled mainstream media.

As matter of fact, many families of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack victims are still trying to get a sense of closure on a potential involvement of Saudi Arabia, at the highest level, in the tragedy to this day without much success, as a form of foreign policy Omerta seems to prevail in the US with the Saudis royal family. This was certainly not a war of necessity, it barely qualified as a war of choice, as it was a pure fit of anger against an individual and his relatively small organization, not even against a state .

Twenty years later, back to square one, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan affairs, but NATO, the military coalition of the impulsive and ill informed are still not candidly making mea culpa, and admitting their gross ineptitude and almost criminal negligence. Colossal failure was always written all over Afghanistan’s bullets ridden walls, mosques and even modest fruit stands! Quagmires were also perfectly predictable in the war on terror sequels in Iraq; Libya (using French/Anglo/UAE proxies); Syria (using proxy good Jihadists), then ISIS (once many of the good Sunni Jihadists somehow decided to turn bad). Described like this the 20-year war on terror’s horrendous fiascos sound like the theater of the absurd! Absurd for the successive policy makers and incompetent or corrupt planners, but tragic for the almost one million dead and their surviving families, the 38 million refugees or internally displaced, and countries like Libya, turned into wrecked failed states. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex, including the private contractors, has become more powerful than ever.

The tragically failed policies of the past 20 years have to be quantified. According to Brown University Watson Institute, and this is a conservative estimate, the human cost of post 9/11 wars is around 800,000 in direct deaths; 38 million people worldwide is the number of war refugees and displaced persons collateral victims of the war on terror; and finally, the US war on terror spending from 2001 to 2020 was $6.4 trillion. All this money extracted from the US taxpayers, and enthusiastically approved in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, was injected into the private corporations of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon of course, to a lesser extend, and ultimately as a billionaire-making cash bonanza into Wall Street and all global financial markets. How it works is rather simple: below are two prime examples, among countless other similar schemes, to profit from the war machine.

One quick example of war for mega-profit comes to mind. Before he accepted to be George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney was the CEO of the giant construction, oil and mineral extraction firm Halliburton. Right before he started to campaign, he, of course, resigned from his CEO function and sold his huge Halliburton stock portfolio to avoid conflict of interests. Fast forward to 2003, and guess which firm is getting the lion share of private contracts for the Iraq war? Halliburton of course. Coincidence? Hard to believe. Such example of vast sums of money being recycled from the taxpayers’ pocket book to the coffers of private companies war profiteers are countless.

The other example is the major weapon systems manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin manufactures fighter jets like F-15, F-16, F-35, and F-21; helicopters like Blackhawks and Cyclone, as well as Drones. On January 19, 2000 the share value for Lockheed Martin was $12.10. By January 17, 2020 Lockheed Martin stock traded at $408.77 a share. The bottom line: who in the US Congress would dare to say no to funding the military-industrial complex via the US Defense Department budget? Basically nobody. It would be deemed unpatriotic and bad for the job market, considering that the military-industrial complex employs a lot of people.

Terror is out, global pandemic is in

One cannot help making an analogy between the war on terror and the new global war for profit, which is the war on Covid. As the war on terror is being exposed as a complete fiasco and receding in history’s rear view mirror, global capitalism needed something else. It magically materialized as a global biological warfare against a virus.What a golden opportunity! Since March 2020 — a bit later in the crisis actually — the beneficiaries of the war on Covid have been, not only pharmaceutical companies, but also digital giants that benefit from remote-location work due to measures like lockdowns, online commerce; and, finally, the global financial markets.

France’s President Macron was, to my knowledge, the very first world leader to use the bellicose semantic of war on Covid. He did it in March 2020. We have seen previously that the war on terror has been immensely profitable for the nexus of global corporate imperialism, but the recent war on Covid could be even more profitable, as its protagonists/profiteers appear to be benevolent, even altruistic. The current push worldwide, and Macron was once again ahead of the game, is either to make vaccination mandatory, or blackmail the population with coercive measures like the Pass Sanitaire in France, to obey and comply.

This is the calculus and assumption that all governments and biotech affiliates are likely making. Let’s say that they manage to make vaccination mandatory. Worldwide, you would have a captive market of around 7.8 billion people. Even if 800 million people globally resist vaccination, we are talking about an extraordinarily profitable market. At around $15 per dose for the best-adopted vaccines on the market, which are from Pfizer and Moderna, multiplied by two, or even better by three, as is now recommended by pharmaceutical companies and some governments, because of the Delta variant, we are talking about some serious cash flow. With booster jabs likely recommended down the line every nine months or so, we are talking about a biotech Eldorado!

As an example of the heavenly jolt of joy vaccines have already injected into the arms of the Masters of the Universe of global finance, Moderna stock on January 2, 2020 traded at $19.57 a share. On August 11, 2021, Moderna stock traded on Wall Street at $440.00 a share. It is rather obvious, besides various stimulus package schemes applied in all countries to boost economies and prevent a massive Covid economic recession, global financial markets, with the big hedge funds pulling the strings, have become addicted to vaccines. It is no wonder that all major Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already made vaccination mandatory for their employees. It is no wonder either, why stock markets, like the CAC40 in France, have reached record high despite a severe contraction of the real economy.

I previously mentioned the real cost of the 20-year war on terror as being $6.4 trillion for the United States alone. It is not yet possible to quantify the real cost of the so-called global war on Covid. One can suspect it will be very high as well, and its human cost higher in term of diminished personal liberties. The negative side effects of the war on Covid are mainly sociological and psychological, as it has already increased human isolation and fragmented communities. This 18-month old pseudo war on a virus has also withdrawn global resources and focus from the only war of necessity, the one critical for our species survival: namely the war on climate collapse.

War on climate collapse is a war against capitalism

The war on Covid could even last longer than the war on terror. Cynically, the reason for this is that the war on Covid has worked wonders for the benefit of corporations and the super-rich. It has also allowed for governments that are supposed to be neoliberal economically and progressive socially to become paradoxically authoritarian. A prime example, in this instance, is again Emmanuel Macron’s government in France. As long as wars, invented or not, either conventional or conceptual, can be used to extract a profit, they will remain the modus operandi for the billionaire class and their political surrogates. It might sound Utopian, but let’s just imagine for a moment what humanity could do collectively to address the climate crisis existential threat, if we were going to implement a global policy of massive cuts in military spending and security apparatus.

Trillion of dollars could be allocated to the true emergency that will determine our survival or extinction. What could be more critical than this for our children and grandchildren? Climate collapse is on its way. During this entire summer, large areas of Earth were on fire, and others were flooded. Killer storms will keep coming relentlessly at us. Before 2050 many coastlines will be submerged, causing more than 1 billion people worldwide to become the climate collapse refugees. This is not a projection or speculation, it is documented by the scientific community.

Unfortunately, the reason why our Banana Republic styles of governments are not willing to fight this war of necessity, the war on climate change, is because it can only be really fought by getting rid of the capitalist system altogether. Radical approaches are needed, such as scrapping capitalism’s holy precept of permanent economic growth and its correlation of population growth. The remedies to try to mitigate the unfolding climate collapse would be many tough pills to swallow, because it’s about drastic systemic changes. Such as a zero-growth, sometime called negative-growth, economic model, which even Green parties at large do not embrace. The notion of Green New Deal is ludicrous. Green politicians either do not get it or are complete hypocrites if they are not also staunch anti-capitalists.

Another issue almost never addressed by Green politicians anywhere is the one of overpopulation. The rapid growth of the human population is a fundamental factor for capitalism as it provides two critical elements: plenty of cheap labor as well as a continuously growing consumption base. Case in point, in 1850 or at the start of the industrial revolution, the global world population stood at around 1 billion people; currently, or 171 years later and not much time in term of human history, it stands at around 7.8 billion. Some demographic projections forecast that it will reach between 10 to 13 billion by 2100. Needless to say, from a purely physical standpoint, this is entirely unsustainable as the surface of Earth’s landmass has gone unchanged. The problem with overpopulation, as an issue, is that almost everyone in every culture rightly views his or her ability to procreate as a fundamental right. My News Junkie Post partner, Dady Chery, and I, we know that even to bring up overpopulation as an issue is extremely unpopular. However, it has to be done.

Without a massive reduction in carbon emissions, we are on track to pass the fatal mark of a 2-degree Celsius global warming, not by 2050 but by 2035. In other words, a wrench has to be jammed into the gear of the infernal machine created by humans since the mid-19th century’s industrial revolution. Carbon emitting fossil fuels, of any kind, have to stay in the ground. Combustion vehicles should be banned promptly, and massive subsidies should be given to produce extremely affordable and fully electrical cars immediately.

Many in the West point the finger at the big carbon emitters, which are China, India and Brazil. But they are not the only culprits for the nearly criminal inaction of our governing instances. The populations of countries that rely heavily on extraction must put a severe pressure on their politicians or vote them out of office. One thinks, of course, of the Gulf’s usual suspects like Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but other major players are almost as nefarious as far as having an economy built on energy or mineral extraction. A short list of the main countries heavily involved in the fossil fuel extraction business, either for domestic consumption or exports, would be: Russia, The United States, Canada, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran.

Would the various radical changes – including capping human population growth- which seem to be objectively needed be painful? Certainly. But the alternative option, which is basically to keep the course of this giant high-speed bullet train without a pilot that is global capitalism, amounts to a medium-term collective suicide.

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, five, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen by Gilbert Mercier; photograph two by Gianfranco Goria; photograph three from the archive of Halloween HJB; photograph four from the archive of Recuerdos de Pandora; photographs six, seven and sixteen from the US Army archive; photograph eight from the archive of Christopher Dombres; and photograph eleven by Jeremy Hunsinger.

Live interview of Gilbert Mercier on this topic with Inayet Wadee on South African based radio Salaamedia, August 11, 2021.

Strategy of reward and punishment

In the newly coined so-called War on Covid, the arsenal is eclectic. There is not only science, in the form of experimental RNA vaccines hastily developed by giants of the pharmaceutical industry, but also semi-authoritarian or full-blown authoritarian government measures imposed and legally validated by declarations of states of emergencies. The panoply of edicts include mandatory face masks indoor and sometime outdoor, depending on the country; enforced or unenforced social distancing recommendations; limitation of public or even private gatherings; and more drastic measures like lock-downs and curfews.

The crescendo of assaults on personals liberties eased up for a few months, but governments are now using, because of the spread of the Delta variant, the threats of reinstating their coercion as an insidious blackmail to force people to get vaccinated. In other words, if one has the temerity to refuse the salvation brought by Big Pharma’s vaccines, life shall be so extremely problematic and isolated as almost to make one a social pariah. In France President Macron is defining a new ideology that could be called semi-authoritarian neoliberalism, while in the Philippines neofascist Duarte is entirely blunt in his approach. Regardless, both politicians have the same goal: to get their entire population vaccinated. They use a strategy of psychological warfare based on reward and punishment, a bit similar to that used on lab mice.

In the case of Macron, the reward for the good and fully vaccinated French citizens is that they will carry, as a badge of honor, a Pass Sanitaire. The misfits, refuseniks, pesky bad citizens who still refuse to see the light and comply will receive punishments. These bad French apples will be deprived from travel except in their own vehicles, and from cultural events like concerts, movies and museum exhibits.

Duarte’s fascist approach, if more brutal, is in a sense a bit more honest. It is still about manipulating his population with the rewards versus punishments principle, but there are many sticks and basically no carrots. Case in point: Duarte is seriously considering locking up in their homes those Filipinos who refuse to be vaccinated. One can only wonder what will happen to the vast homeless population in the Philippines.

Vaccines, the universal silver bullet

Covid management styles and policies have been diverse in tone and strategies, but it seems that governments worldwide are all watching, then mimicking, at times, each other’s minor achievements to avoid major failures. Only one question is on their minds, which seems to be the universal governmental panacea, independently of ideology: how do we get the entire population vaccinated?

In the more sophisticated media manipulation of Western democracies, the secondary questions are as follows. How do we convince the citizenry that the coercive measures put in place nearly 18 months ago, in a quasi entirely undemocratic fashion by decrees etc., were gently forced on people for their own good rather than in an attempt to avoid a global economic collapse? And further, how do we persuade them that these measures will be entirely lifted one day to go back to an almost mythological happy pre-Covid world?

In other words, how can leaders, with varying degrees of incompetence and undisclosed ties to giant global corporate interests, make people believe that they are acting for the common good rather than to avoid a global stock market crash? Altruism and the collective social good rarely guide the paths of politicians anywhere, and citizens in large numbers have finally caught on to this reality.

People have become more doubtful about what they are told, either directly by their elected officials, or through mainstream media outlets via so-called experts charged with propagating — yes, like propaganda — the government narrative with powerful bullhorns, and sort of carpet-bombing people’s brains with a relentless coverage of the immense danger of Covid, especially the brand new Delta variant, and the great virtue of vaccines as being almost 92 percent accurate silver bullets against the pandemic.

Unfortunately, a one-note intrusive narrative eventually has an undesired effect on a fragment of the population. This is precisely what is going on in France since Macron made the choice, which could be fatal to his political future, to jam through parliament, in the middle of the summer holidays, a law infamously called Pass Sanitaire, to blackmail French people into mandatory vaccination. Many opponents perceive it as a pass to submission, and they have decided to make their voices heard, loud and clear, in the streets. Will this movement of dissent be long lived, contagious to other countries, or ultimately twisted and hijacked for a political purpose? This is so far a question in limbo? The large scale protests, however, were unexpected.

A smoke screen to mask climate collapse

A year ago the Covid-19 pandemic accounted for about 75 percent of the media coverage across the board worldwide. This alone, if a virus could have been granted the Person of the Year award from Time Magazine, would have assured it the coveted price. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won person of the year in 2020, but if it had been Creature of the Year, SARS-CoV-2 would have won. As matter of fact, one can easily argue that without the Covid crisis, Donald Trump would have likely been reelected. In political, sociological, and economic affairs, the microorganism has been a game changer.

So far, Covid has not been a seed of much needed social change but instead has been used as a nasty new tool for disaster capitalism to thrive by changing some fundamental economic parameters,as well as serve as a powerful device to concentrate wealth. What could be better for capitalism than to convince taxpayers that their money needs to be injected by the trillions into corporate conglomerates? Across the world, in all the COVID-19 stimulus funding schemes, the lion share went to corporations while private citizens got the crumbs. Wall Street should have crashed but didn’t, because vast amount of public funds were pumped into the global financial markets. Airlines that were saved from bankruptcy by a Covid bail out should have been nationalized; instead Air France, for example, remained a private company with an overpaid CEO while France’s government became a bigger share holder.

The bait and switch worked on a global scale. It worked with the financial aspect, just like it worked in the semantic of fear. For the media, it’s all about key words. Some might have noticed that at first it was COVID-19, then it became simply Covid, but now, probably because the word’s traction is wearing off, governments or corporate-controlled outlets have switched to Delta variant. It is today winner in the fear factor department, and it is repeated ad nauseum. This element of constant fear has established a nice level of docility in a majority of the global population, as well as a numbing anxiety focused on the narrow topic of the pandemic, and the easy vaccine fix proposed by governments.

The cloud of anxiety has obstructed from many the clarity that WE, as a species, face a threat much greater than a virus. How gullible many of us might be to believe that a pandemic, which so far has killed a quarter of the number of victims of the Spanish flu 100 years ago, is more of an existential threat than the unfolding climate collapse? It is pathetic and ironic for governments and their media servants to use a pandemic as a smoke screen for a much bigger problem, especially when a substantial potion of Earth is currently being consumed by fires.

Last time I checked, 800 wild fires were burning in Italy, Turkey was scorched, the US northwest was still burning, Greece was baking with a 45 degree Celsius temperature, Siberia had been burning for months, and there were killer floods in Germany and China. Meanwhile, the so-called climate experts on mainstream media hardly connected these climate crisis events. They barely connected the dots between extreme weather events and catastrophic climate change by softly saying “isolated extreme weather events could be a manifestation of global climate change.” It shouldn’t be “could be” but are; it shouldn’t be “climate change” but climate crisis. The global fear of Covid is highly lucrative. By contrast a fear of climate collapse — or actually a recognition of its imminence — would lead people to reject the global capitalist system that is driving our species into the abyss. It would lead human societies away from consumption and toward zero-growth economies and population models that would deal capitalism a fatal blow.

We have more or less collectively experienced, since March 2020, a life of fear and a sort of lingering collective anxiety. Fear is usually correlated with a reduction of critical thinking and greatly diminished opposition against the abuse of authority.

The protests in France show that fear can lose ground. Citizens do not have to surrender their fundamental rights of freedom and liberty to the whim of governmental authority based on semi-valid cognitive notions, or purely arbitrary ones, at times absurd, which appear to serve an agenda foreign to the common good. Popular resistance, whatever forms it may take in France and elsewhere, is always a viable option. At critical times in history it even becomes a civic duty.

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photograph one by Jarr1520; photograph two by Robert Muller; photograph three by Grey Area; photograph four by Jonathan; illustration five by Mike Finn; photographs six and nine by Jeanne Menjoulet; photograph seven by Glenn Lewis; and photograph eight by Ian Sanderson.

Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite: under Macron’s pass sanitaire guillotine?

For the few of us who are students of history, and its aficionado travelers, meaning those who muse and wonder, at times, about how significant figures of the past would view our often dire predicament, it is rather obvious that, for example, the founding fathers of the French Revolution such as Danton, Mirabeau, St Just, and Robespierre would be shocked and angry by what has recently happened to their Republic. Even France’s last great statesman General de Gaulle, if alive today, would have likely been deeply enraged by the state of affairs in a country he loved and fought for with his heart and soul.

In the era of President Emmanuel Macron, who is merely a cynical actor, figurehead, and France’s public relation person in chief passing for a statesman, but who truly is a loyal servant of global corporatism, our revolution’s founders, as well as the subsequent republics’ principles, like the one of the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle, have been insulted, slapped in the face, and assaulted by some sort of insidious and limp dictatorship, under the cover of a health crisis. A complex authoritarian strategy using the pretense of shielding French citizens, often against their will, in this new lucrative conceptual war.

This war on a virus is even more advantageous than the previous conceptual one: the war on terror. In General Macron’s war, syringes are the weapons delivery system of choice, needles like billions of little worker bees at the ready to jab you for an invitation to control freedom, and a moderate slice of happiness: the joy once you have obtained the French COVID pass Sanitaire to go to museums, movie theaters, inside restaurants, and avoid wearing masks outdoor.

French citizens should be aware that the very motto of our dear Republic, Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite is under the assault of king Ubu Macron and could, without a strong popular resistance, be decapitated by the cold blade of Macron’s virtual guillotine. In a form of dictatorial grab of power for the benefit of big biotech and big pharmaceutical companies. Macron’s pernicious pass sanitaire, just approved by France Assemblee Nationale, is a power grab by global corporate imperialism. Of course, all of it done with a wink, a tan and a smile! All of it done for the greater good of ungrateful “Gaullois refractaire” French citizens, in the continuity of the pesky Gilets Jaunes. Science lover poseur Macron, an enlightened modern day Julius Cesar, is bent on defeating obscurantism armed only with syringes to deliver his brand of salvation thru vaccines. Those who have been in the forefront of the street protest in France to resist this hybrid neoliberal dictatorship personified by Macron are the still active Gilets Jaunes.

From war on terror to war on virus: maximum profit for big tech & pharma

Forget about the good old so-called war-on-terror, fading slightly since its start in September 2001 but still a nice little threat in the background, big enough to keep the military-industrial complex flush with cash. A new conceptual global war was needed: the global war on COVID virus came at the right time. This one is even more promising, as it potentially concern the entire world population or 7.5 billion people. The COVID war has also been an easy sell for the general population, as it can be viewed as a war of necessity with humans “all in it together.” It can also provide an astronomical stream of revenue by making vaccination mandatory. In terms of profit from pandemics, vaccine companies have not been the only beneficiaries of this COVID gold rush.

Big tech companies have racked up billions of dollars at a furious pace since March 2020 and the various restrictive measures of lock-downs and curfews. The likes of Amazon, Zoom and streaming media have handsomely benefited from the imposed partial move to a virtual world. As matter of fact, worldwide stock markets have become junkies to this trend: addicted to the war on COVID benefits.

Needless to say, this vast stream of income is also potentially endless because of the virus mutation into different variants. One loses track of this Greek alphabet catalogue. It was Alpha first or the English variant, then Beta or the Brazilian one, more contagious than the rhythm of Samba, and now it is the Delta variant originally called Indian mutation. As the virus mutates, as they all do, it could potentially take us all the way to Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. The side effect of the Delta variant’s rapid spread has been to allow Macron, and soon many others, head-of-states or figureheads, to tighten back the screw on fundamental liberties.

Rule by decree, states of emergency, arbitrary measures, absurd,or not, are a form of abuse of power that neoliberals like Macron are really enjoying. It is an insidious form of dictatorship under a benevolent disguise of the enlightened rulers forcing their citizenry’s behavior. In France a law is about to pass, in parliament, to make vaccine for healthcare workers across board mandatory. If they do not comply by September 15, 2021, they will be fired. In the case of France, this should be viewed as a prelude to mandatory vaccination for the entire population.

Killing personal freedom and liberties

In France, government controlled mainstream media, critiques rightly calling the Macron administration’s sweeping COVID policies a “dictature sanitaire” or healthcare dictatorship have been labeled conspiracy theorists. This is pure disinformation, as what defines a dictatorship, semantically speaking, is a government, elected or not, forcing policies on its citizens. It is done under the premise that it is an action for the benefit of the common good, but nonetheless it is the exercise of authoritarian power on a population.

Through the COVID-19 pandemics, governments have learned that, if fear and paranoia were prevalent enough, and they run a lot of polls in their respective population, any dictatorial measures could be implemented without risking much social turmoil. A great majority of people did, and would likely comply again to other lock-downs, wearing masks outdoors, curfews, but without much protest. Now the final frontier is mandatory vaccination from 12 years-old on, which will give you some sort of health passport. If approved. this pass would give people the right to live almost free. This new type of passport, given to you as a reward to your obedience, will give you access to a mythical promised land often called by Macron “the return of the happy days!”

COVID fear mongering: subterfuge to hide climate collapse threat

There is no doubt, for any rational minds, that contesting the reality of the COVID pandemic is pure conspiracy theory. More than that, it is full blown lunacy! There are two radical anti-vaxers thought processes here: firstly, deny the existence of the pandemic entirely; secondly, which might be even more disturbing, an unshakable belief that the virus was man made, and released on purpose by the like of Fauci, Bill Gates, and a hand full of mad scientists. And, of course, here’s the icing on the cake: they’re all acting on behalf of a cabal of globalist pedophiles. These are the kinds of conspiracy theories that currently get you banned on social media.

As much as they are colorfully insane, this type of COVID-19 conspiracy theory denials are not, in essence, any worse than climate change crisis denial. The difference being that your average run of the mill climate change denier won’t get banned on social media. The nature of the capitalist global corporatism system, where neoliberals like Macron are leading figures, is not to create a crisis from scratch, which is either an impossible or very challenging task, but instead to take advantage of crisis either to further general policy goals, or in most cases benefit punctually from them like an opportunistic predator. This predatory aspect is after all the very nature of capitalism.

Besides the numerous advantages that Macron, his political colleagues and their patrons from the billionaire class have found in the COVID crisis, as explained above, not only huge financial gains for pharmaceutical companies, but also for tech companies involved in this sort of forced quantum leap to the virtual world. In brief, this has been a chance to brutally shock the global economy. Not to make it more equal or sustainable, but quite exactly the opposite: COVID has been an opportunity to concentrate wealth even more in fewer hands with a net result of more social inequality.

Because in today’s press one story is always used to hide another, the pandemic has been also a blessed opportunity to hide, not the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, but instead the 10,000-ton Godzilla wrecking the planet: Godzilla, in this case, being the growing certainty of an upcoming global climate collapse.

Of the “Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite motto of the French revolution, all the great values have been trampled and gutted. With lock-downs, curfews, mandatory masks and vaccine, Liberte is now gone. In the era of Macron, a former investment banker, nobody can talk about Egalite in a country which is on its way to become almost as unequal as the United States; and last but not least, how could anyone see any Fraternite left? The community sense of brotherhood died quite sometime ago in France. There is no brotherhood left, no deep sense of connection within the nation, we are not “all in this together”.

In reality, there is only all of us, common men and women worldwide, against the billionaire class that controls the levers of the global corporate imperialist machines, with their political servant facilitators acting as heads of state. The specific names within the political class are of little significance, since they represent the identical interests. It’s a bit like the names given to the COVID variants. The Delta variant, portrayed as the top threat right now, started more modestly as India’s mutation. Who knows, perhaps in some billionaire class circles, Emmanuel Macron is just called factor X, LV or MANU.

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Illustrations one, two, four and nine from the archive of Citoyen Chouette; photographs three and six by Marco Verch; photograph five by Roger Jones; and photographs seven and eight by Jeanne Menjoulet.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Marabou of My Heart. Copyright © Dady Chery and News Junkie Post Press 2021. All rights reserved.

It is impossible to know precisely why, one week before my mother left Haiti, she took me to Croix-des-Prés and left me with Sò Gras.

If I had to describe Sò Gras’ milieu in a single word, it would be perfume. A giant Ylang-ylang tree shaded the last hundred feet or so of the dirt road that led to the turn toward her house. Every breeze along that stretch brought an immersion in a pool of perfume, because the tree had shed a thick carpet of fragrant petals as well as extended its horizontal branches, heavy with yellow flowers, low over the street. At the house itself, all day women waited their turn on the porch to file into the patchouli-scented inner sanctum for their herbal baths and consultations.

Sò Gras was as popular a manbo as my grandmother was a hair stylist. Most of her clients looked as if they had come for a business transaction. Some brought along their children. A few arrived alone, angry, confused, quiet and turned in on themselves, crying, or holding their faces in despair. These cases tended to take longer than usual, but Sò Gras’ skill was such that all her clients left with a straighter spine and sweeter scent.

Beyond the porch, Sò Gras’ one-story house was divided into five rooms, all with cement flooring. The first was a large vestibule with a mirrored buffet, and a large straw rug on which stood a dining table surrounded by six wooden chairs with straw seats and backs. Colorful depictions of Haitian life decorated the walls. A hallway divided the rest of the house into left and right sections. The first two rooms had no door and directly faced each other. They were Sò Gras’ own room on the right, and the children’s room on the left. In Sò Gras’ room stood a large armoire, a stool, a mirrored vanity set with a crystal powder jar and family photos, and a surprisingly small bed for someone her size. By contrast, the children’s room was furnished with a bed so large that nothing else could fit in the space, and so high that we had to step onto a small bench to reach the mattress. All three of us slept on that bed.

We were not supposed to enter the two usually closed back rooms where Sò Gras took her clients, but we did, whenever we could hear her jingling charm bracelets recede toward the town center and street market. In the room on the right, green banana leaves usually lined the floor. Near the center, there were three chairs, a table with a brass incense bowl, and a tub half full of water on which floated fresh leaves of Wild Basil, Verbena, Soursop, or the blossoms of Sour Orange trees. A mortar two feet tall and pestle twice as long, sculpted from the wood of Sour Orange trees, stood in one corner.

In the other back room, on the left, everything was spare and immaculate. A table and two chairs faced an arched alcove lined with a silk drape. Depending on the day, the lustrous fabric seemed to change to red, blue, or green. On a bright-white embroidered linen cloth sat a framed image of a black Madonna and child, a heart-shaped red satin pillow about the size of a hand, silver necklaces, bottles of perfume, a goat skull, a cup of coffee or cocoa, and half-gourds with meal courses. The dishes were usually freshly cooked gryo, bannann peze, pistach grye, and diri kole ak pwa. My new friends said the food was for Èzili Dantò. I have since come to recognize her as the spirit from the Vodou pantheon who embodies love’s courage and fury. Èzili had not eaten at all. I proposed that this was because there was no sauce, but my friends insisted that this was how she liked her meals. Though the food smelled delicious, we did not touch it, because we calculated that the portions would be too easy to keep track of. We sprayed the perfumes onto our wrists, sniffed them, and then rushed to wash ourselves up to the elbows so we wouldn’t get caught stealing from a lwa.

A small door at the end of the hallway led to the kitchen and latrine in the house’s backyard. The level yard continued for a while before it descended abruptly into a mountain that overlooked Port-au-Prince and the sea beyond it. One had to be there to know that the mountainside was not merely verdant but also fragrant and lined by shrubs and herbs with crimson, orange, and yellow florets. I liked to sit quietly on a lichen-coated boulder to watch the afternoons unfold into sunsets over the bay. Anoles, larger lizards, and Hutias lived in the crevices; gorgeous Trogons and Palm-Tanagers visited the bushes. Free-ranging goats, chickens, guinea hens, dairy cows, and little black pigs passed nearby on their way home for the nights.

Near my rock, on a bed of moss one afternoon, I found a Haitian Emerald. From beak to tail, the hummingbird measured four inches, if one ignored the detail that its needle beak and tail feathers easily accounted for half of its length. My heart broke at the sight of that improbably tiny and beautiful bird, with one extended lavender wing that refused to budge even as its desire to take flight manifested in the glitter of its moving emerald throat in the sun. I cupped it in my hand to keep it warm and took it with me everywhere. Sò Gras learned my news and asked to see the bird, which I showed to her.

“A Wanganègès Mòn! These birds are really good for magic! I could use it!” she enthused. When it dies, give it to me, okay?”

The thought that the bird might die had not occurred to me. Tears welled up in my eyes, until I got an idea.

“If it dies, will you revive it with your magic?” I asked.

“I cannot promise you that, sweetie. All I’m saying is, just remember not to get rid of it, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and wondered if this was an admission that her magic sometimes failed.

The bird refused my offerings of sugar water in a bottle cap. I hoped its wing would soon heal so it could go feed itself. That night, I emptied a large matchbox, bundled the small creature into a bed of moss, being careful to leave a narrow gap so it could breathe, and slipped the box under the bed. The moment I woke up, I checked on the bird. Its previously alert eyes were shut and its feet rigid. I left it there and went to my rock to cry. I walked back when I heard Sò Gras’ calls to come get her coffee and fresh rolls. At the breakfast, she informed us that she had taken the bird.

A huge ruckus from a Rara band on the porch startled me awake on my final night at Sò Gras’ house. Because of the stories I had heard from Denise about the skinless demons that roamed the night, whipping zombies and feasting on anyone they found, especially children, I was convinced I was about to be eaten alive. My friends laughed at me and ran expectantly to the front room. Sò Gras, who usually wore white, put on a red scarf and wide-skirted rainbow-colored dress. She lit all the kerosene lamps, walked to the front, lifted the door’s heavy black hook from its eye, and opened wide the entryway. Dozens of musicians and their followers poured into the open rooms of the house. “Onè,” they said, as they bowed to Sò Gras. “Respè,” she answered, with a wide grin. Some carried machetes. I rushed to my friends’ side for safety.

Members of the ensemble wore colorful sequined costumes that sparkled like hummingbirds as they moved. Its two leaders, a man and woman, sported the most elaborate sequin patterns; the man also wore a shiny hat from which streamed multicolored strips of cloth. Except for a large group of singers, the musicians came in sets of three. Three hollowed out bamboo tubes of different lengths preceded three metal horns that looked like long funnels, and three goatskin drums of different sizes. Each bamboo player also tapped on his instrument with a long stick. There followed a troop that rattled and beat smaller percussive instruments.

Sò Gras somehow found plenty of food and especially drink, which she always seemed to have. The visit turned into a huge party that burst with rolls of laughter while her guests ate and drank their fill, and she caught up on their news. When the libations were nearly finished, she squeezed some bills into the queen’s hand. The king gave a signal, the group filed out into the backyard, carrying the lamps, and the party began in earnest under a full moon. It was a complete show, and all the more extraordinary because it was unexpected. The songs usually began with a call and response between the male and female singers, or short riffs invented jointly by the different horns, which developed into polyphonic interlocked lines. As the drums and other percussive instruments kicked in with increasingly animating rhythms, the king and queen led the dances and juggle of batons and machetes. Rara, being an expression of service to a Vodou spirit, its bands did not stop everywhere, even if offered a contribution, but only at sites important to the lwa, like venerable old trees, graves of revered ancestors, or homes of respected manbos and oungans. I believe Sò Gras’s house was the group’s destination that night. They rejoiced in her dance and performed for us until the sky started to brighten. I hated to see them go.

I woke up to a strong scent of coffee in the vestibule. Sò Gras and my mother were at the table talking over a cup. I ran to kiss my mother and then disappeared into the yard for my morning toilette. I had learned to do this since I was about five. I filled a basin with about three gallons of water, dipped a small bar of soap into it, lathered up my face, neck and armpits, and then rinsed them from the basin. After this, I sat on the basin with my skirt extended all around it for modesty, to wash my privates in the same way, and finally I sat on a chair to do my feet. I dried myself with a towel, put on new panties, switched my old dress for a fresh one, and joined the breakfast table. When we were nearly finished with our bread and coffee, Sò Gras excused herself to the chamber with the tub and leaves.

She carried back a small crystal jar with a thin layer of gray power, which she put in front of me.

“Dady, this is from your little bird!” she said excitedly. “It is rare and priceless!”

My friends piped in that they had never before found this kind of bird or seen it from so close. In fact the bird’s Kreyòl name, Wanganègès Mòn, meant Mountain Woman’s Magic. Sò Gras explained that she had plucked the bird’s feathers, dried the carcass in the sun several days, ground it with her mortar and pestle, and then retrieved all that she could. Mom looked infinitely proud. Since she asked no further explanation, I assumed they had discussed the rest. I have since learned that a trace of Wanganègès powder is a well-known love charm. I believe Sò Gras had anticipated a singularly potent charm from my hummingbird, which was not trapped and killed, but rescued and loved.

Editor’s Notes: Dr. Dady Chery is the author of We Have Dared to Be Free. Photograph one by NH53; photographs two, seven, eight and ten by Jim McGlone; photograph three by United Nations Photo; photograph five by JayeshPati912; photographs nine, eleven, fourteen, and fifteen by Carsten ten Brink; and photograph sixteen by Likeaduck.

Exits of Netanyahu & Trump: chance to dial down Mideast tensions

The Iraqi geopolitical analyst, Ali Fahim, recently said in an interview with The Tehran Times: “The arrival of [newly elected Iranian President] Ebrahim Raisi at the helm of power gives a great moral impetus to the resistance axis.” Further, with new administrations in the United States, Israel, and Iran, another opportunity presents itself to reinstate fully the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, as well as completely lift the US economic sanctions from Iran.

Let us wait and see after Raisi is in power in August 2021. It is a fact that, since the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal, tensions have been on the rise. One can legitimately suspect that the Trump pull out had as its real intentions: first, to provoke Tehran; second to undo one of the only foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, which was negotiated by John Kerry for the US. The Trump administration also used unfair economic sanctions on Iran as a squeeze for regime-change purposes. This was a complete fiasco: the Islamic Republic of Iran suffered but held together.

As far as military tensions in the region, there are many countries besides Syria where conflicts between Iran-supported groups and US-supported proxies are simmering, or full blown. The US does its work, not only via Israel in the entire region, but also Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen, and presently Turkey in Syria. Right now conflicts are active in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Palestine, but something could ignite in Lebanon at any time.

Iran views itself as the lead supporter of the resistance movement, not only through its support for regional allies like Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad, but also beyond the Middle-East, for Maduro in Venezuela. The upcoming Iranian administration does not hide its international ambition. For better or worse, Iran sees itself as a global leader of smaller nonaligned countries that are resisting US imperialism, be it Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, or Venezuela. Even though Iran is completely different ideologically, it has replaced the leadership of Yugoslavia’s Tito or Cuba’s Castro. Both were not only Marxists but also leaders of the nonaligned movement during the Cold War, when the US and the USSR were competing to split the world in two. Now the dynamics have shifted because of China’s rising global influence, and the Iran Islamic Republic thinks it has a card to play in this complex geopolitical imbroglio.

In the US, Europe and Gulf States, Raisi has been categorized as a hardliner cleric and judge, but this gives Raisi more power than he will have as president. In Iran, major foreign policy issues are not merely up to the president to decide but a consensus process involving many. In the end such critical decisions are always signed off by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei has already indicated that he supports going back to the 2015 nuclear deal. During his electoral campaign, Raisi, who is close to Khamenei despite previous opposition, said that if elected he would uphold the 2015 landmark nuclear agreement.

Ottoman empire revival under Erdogan

Turkey’s President, Recep Erdogan, often behaves as a modern day Sultan. He is shrewd and extremely ambitious. He fancies himself to be the global leader, politically and militarily, of Sunny Islam. Under Erdogan, Turkey has flexed its military muscles, either directly or through Syrian proxies, not only in Syria, but also in Libya, as well as in Turkey’s support for Qatar in the small Gulf State’s recent skirmish with Saudi Arabia. Erdogan thinks he now has a card to play in Afghanistan. More immediately and strategically, the serious issue on Erdogan’s plate is called Idlib.

The problem of the pocket of Idlib has to be resolved, and unfortunately, for all the civilian population that has been and will be in the crossfire, it can only be solved by a full-on military operation, with troops from Bashar al-Assad and Russia. Turkey is, of course, adamant about keeping a military presence and influence within Syria to prevent a complete Assad victory. Time will tell, but the war of attrition has to end. For this to happen, Russia has to commit to face Turkey from a military standpoint. If Russia is ready for a direct confrontation with Turkey, then Bashar al-Assad’s troops, and Russian forces bringing mainly logistic and air support, should prevail.

What should make this easier is the fact Erdogan has overplayed his hand for quite some time. This includes his tense relationships with his supposed NATO allies, many of whom, including France, Greece and even Germany, would not mind having him out of NATO altogether.

There are important factors that explain, not only why Erdogan is quite popular with Turks, but also why his position could become precarious. Erdogan is playing on the Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire.

From one Empire to two others: the Sykes-Picot agreement

To understand better this imperial dynamic, we must go back to the middle of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany. In 1916, the Sykes-Picot secret agreement effectively sealed the fate of post World War I Middle-East. This British-French agreement, in expectation of a final victory, was a de-facto split of the Ottoman Empire. In the resulting colonial or imperial zones of influence, a euphemism for an Anglo-French control of the region, the British would get Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf area, while France would take control of Syria and Lebanon. More than 100 years later, the misery created by this imperialist deal lingers in the entire region, from Palestine, with the 1948 English-blessed creation of the Zionist state of Israel, to Iraq. France put in place two protectorates in Syria and Lebanon, in which the respective populations did not fare much better. Even today, French governments still act as if they have a say in Lebanese affairs.

The weight of history and the nostalgia of 600 years of rule in the Middle-East are why some Turks — especially Erdogan — feel entitled to an intrusive role in the region. The unfortunate story of the Middle-East has been to go from one imperialism to another. With the American empire taking over in the mid-1950s, the only competition during the Cold War became the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US had carte blanche. It became more blunt about the exploitation of resources, regime-change policies and its role as the eternal champion of the sacred state of Israel. Quickly, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar became the US’ best friends in the Arab world. I have called this alliance between the West, Israel and the oil-rich Gulf states an unholy alliance. It is still at play, mainly against Iran.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the US empire has tried to assert a worldwide hegemony by mainly two different approaches: support of autocratic regimes like those in the Gulf States, or pursuit of regime change policies to get rid of sovereign nations. This is what I have identified as engineering failed states: a doctrine at play in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Often, Islam soldiers of fortune — called at first freedom fighters as in Afghanistan, or the so-called Free Syrian Army — have mutated down the line into ISIS terrorists. Once the mercenaries developed independent ambitions, they served a dual purpose: firstly, as tools of proxy wars; secondly as a justification for direct military interventions by the empire and its vassals. Since the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the bottom line results have been the same: death and destruction. Tabula rasa of Iraq, Libya and Syria, with countries left in ruins, millions killed, and millions of others turned into refugees and scattered to the winds. The numbers are mind boggling in the sheer horrors they reflect. According to the remarkable non-partisan Brown University Costs of War project, since the start of the US-led so-called war on terror, post September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere the direct cost in people killed has been over 801,000. So far, the financial burden for US taxpayers has been $6.4 trillion.

Does Erdogan think he can do better than Alexander the Great with Afghans?

Apparently Erdogan’s imperial ambitions reach as far as the land of the Pashtuns. The Taliban already control about 85 percent of Afghanistan. While most NATO troops have either left or are in the process of doing so, Erdogan has volunteered Turkish troops to secure Kabul’s airport. Some in the Middle-East speculate, rightly or wrongly, that Erdogan plans to send to Afghanistan some of his available Syrian mercenaries, like those he has used in Libya. Even if this is rubber stamped by regional powers like Pakistan or Iran, which it won’t be, such a direct or proxy occupation will fail. If Turkish or Syrian mercenaries, or any other foreign proxies for that matter, try to get in the way of the Taliban, they will be shredded to bits.

Does Erdogan think he is a modern day version of Alexander the Great? This is plainly laughable! The Taliban are resuming control of Afghanistan, and that is the reality. Something Afghans agree upon is that they want all occupying foreigners out. This will include Turkish and Syrian mercenaries.

Post Netanyahu Israel: more of the same for Palestinians?

For the Palestinians living either in Gaza or in the occupied territories, one element that has changed in Israel is that Netanyahu is no longer in power. It would be naive to think that the new Israeli administration will be less Zionist in its support for Jewish settlers expanding their occupation of Palestinian land, but we might see a small shift, more like a pause in Israel’s bellicose behavior.

Lebanon on the brink: opportunity for Israel to attack Hezbollah?

Despite Lebanon’s dreadful political and economic situation, Israel would be ill advised to consider any military action. Hezbollah is a formidable fighting force of 70,000 men, who have been battle hardened for almost a decade in Syria. Vis a vis Iran, a direct aggression of Israel is even less likely. With Trump gone, it seems that Israel’s hawks have missed out on that opportunity. Furthermore, it would be borderline suicidal for the Jewish state to open up many potential fronts at once against Hezbollah, Hamas, and Bashar al-Assad’s army. All of them would have the backing and logistic support of Iran.

Once the 2015 nuclear agreement is in force again, with the Biden administration, the tensions in the region should significantly decrease. It is probable that in the new negotiations, Iran will request that all the US economic sanctions, which were put in place by the Trump administration, be lifted.

Neocolonial imperialism: a scourge that can be defeated

One thing about US administrations that has remained constant pretty much since the end of World War II is an almost absolute continuity in foreign policy. From Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump, and now Trump to Biden, it hardly matters if the US president is a Democrat or Republican. The cornerstone of foreign policy is to maintain, and preferably increase, US hegemony by any means necessary. This assertion of US imperial domination, with help from its NATO vassals, can be blunt like it was with Trump, or more hypocritical with a pseudo humanitarian narrative as during the Obama era.

The imperatives of military and economic dominance have been at the core of US policies, and it is doubtful that this could easily change. Mohammed bin-Salman‘s war in Yemen is part of this scenario. Some naively thought MBS would be pushed aside by the Biden administration. The clout of the Saudis remained intact, however, despite the CIA report on the gruesome assassination of a Washington Post journalist in Turkey. All evidence pointed to bin-Salman, but he was not pushed aside by his father. Under Biden, MBS is still Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, and de-facto autocratic ruler. The Saudis’ oil and money still have considerable influence in Washington.

The Saudis understand very well that, since the 1970s, their real geopolitical power has resided in the way they can impact global oil prices. They can still make the barrel price go up or down to serve specific geopolitical interests. For example, recently the Saudis tried to help the US regime change policy in Venezuela by flooding the global market to make oil prices crash. Saudi Arabia and its United Arab Emirates ally have used the black gold as an economic weapon countless times, and very effectively.

The great appetite of the Saudis for expensive weapons systems is another reason why they have a lot of weight in Washington and elsewhere. How can one oppose the will of a major client of the corporate merchants of death of the military-industrial complex?

History will eventually record the 20-year Afghanistan war as a defeat and perhaps the beginning of the end for the US empire that established its global dominance aspiration in 1945. People from countries like Yemen, Palestine, as well as Mali, Kashmir, and even Haiti, who are fighting against an occupation of their lands, respectively, by the imperial little helpers Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, India and the United Nations, should find hope in what is going on in Afghanistan. My News Junkie Post partner Dady Chery has explained the mechanics of it brilliantly in her book, We Have Dared to Be Free. Yes, occupiers of all stripes can be defeated! No, small sovereign nations or tribes should not despair! The 20-year US-NATO folly in Afghanistan is about to end. The real outcome is a victory of the Pashtuns-Taliban that is entirely against all odds. It is a victory against the most powerful military alliance ever assembled in history. Yemenites, Palestinians, Tuaregs, Kashmiris, Haitians and other proud people, fighting from different form of neocolonial occupations, should find inspiration from it. It can be done!

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, three, four, six, ten, eleven, twelve, and fifteen from the archive of Newsonline; photographs two, nine and fourteen by Gilbert Mercier; photograph five from the archive of Rawpixel LTD; photographs seven and sixteen from Resolute Support Media archive; photograph eight from the archive Magharebia; photograph thirteen by David Stanley; photograph seventeen from the archive of DVIDSHUB; and photograph eighteen from the archive of Antonio Marin Segovia.