Conditions incl. Ethnic Cleansing, No Distinction between 'Civilian/Military/Gov't', National/Racial Discrimination, and the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation
Laws are silent in times of war, as some greek or roman said long ago.
The general is not wrong (not talking morals here): if Israel is to be rid of Hamas, they must absorb the territory that is Gaza and displace its present population to Egypt, Jordan or Palestine.
Whether that is morally right or not is secondary if the goal is to rid Israel of Hamas and its hundreds of thousands of soldiers on their doorstep.
The reverse is of course that if Hamas is to have any chance to hurt Israel, it must murder civilians via terrorist methods, completely ignoring all the conventions and laws of war.
Which is why it is pointless to argue from a moral standpoint - there isn't one. (There never is, an objective one least of all, until the winner explains why the loser was evil.)
Also, why pick a side based on who is to be pitied the most? Why not pick based on who is a (potential) threat to you, and pick based on how one group or other behaves or has behaved in the past, referencing yourself and your own grouop?
Far more sensible approach than the endless splitting of hairs to find out who's the "good guys"; we should leave such stupidity to those americans who actually believe in such simplistic logic. Does it benefit Norway and the norwegians to support Hamas? Or palestinian arabs? Or does it benefit Norway more to support Israel? Or neither?
And consider this: by the logic used to condemn Israel by Hamas-supporters and dhimmi all over the West, Britain and the US shouldn't have bombed Germany at all during WW2: the munitions factories were staffed with civilians. Ridiculous.
And the flipside of that is, the british commando units engaging in "ungentlemanly warfare" (i.e. terrorism) inside Germany and German-occupied areas were war criminals and terrorists, just as Hamas is.
Tricky tricky it becomes, when one looks for morals in a practical issue.
Tricky when one looks for overriding morals in war. What really is the meaning of "all is fair in love and war"? On the surface, the meaning is obvious.
On the other hand, in a democratic republic, leaders cannot wage war willy nilly. Furthermore, my attempt to generalize appears right away, to me, as silly. War by whom and in what century? They are all different. In the U.S.A. where Congress has the authority to send troops to war, no such authority was sought in any of our military actions since Viet Nam. That war ended when Congress said no more funds, this was a bad mistake and we didn't authorize it to begin with. I don't remember from history what authorized the U.S. military action in Korea.
To be simplistic, wars are a wager by the state, by heads of state, fought by its youth. Revolutions are attempted by the people. The protection of human rights written into the Constitution of the United States is not unique to the U.S. The human race evolved to that point in certain areas on the globe within a couple hundred years of one amother, while women did not have the right to vote in France until the 1950's. What's my point? The U.S.A. isn't an epitome of good or evil. Neither is any other national or cultural group even if certain cultures take the cake in my opinion when it comes to culture with a capital "C". Evil can be overcome by Good, Maybe, but stupidity, lies and resulting confusion make it impossible. Israel is in the odd position of having been granted their little piece of desert, rather than Zionists having had a country that formed within the Middle Ages or within early modern Europe, grabbing land through warfare as a pre-existing state. Almost every modern nation state came into being by some variation of brute force, statecraft, theft, lies, government controlled trade and ultimately taxation of its citizens. The rest is ideology taught to school children.
I appreciate your bold exposure of agitprop surrounding Ukraine but don't understand why you state the Russia did not sign the Minsk Accords. I followed the link you offered and see these names as signators:
Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, M. Yu. ZurabovA.W. Zakharchenko
I.W. Plotnitski
I don't understand the history of Eastern Europe, which, along with the history of middle Europe, is not taught in American colleges and universities, let alone in secondary educ. I take a great interest now in my retirement years having a British and Russian History Masters with which I did nothing professionally. (I made a personal comment previously on your substack about wanting to take back the Austrian identity that my parents lost when they fled to the U.S.]. When I found,
probably on Wiki, a historical narrative about the 20th c history of Yugoslavia and the involvement of the U.S., I was shocked at the history and dismayed that we The People of the United States know nothing about it.
Prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I had an adult child teaching ESL in southern Russia. I already had a deep love of Russian classical music and literature and was not surprised that my kid fell in love with the people and did not want to come back home. He did, thankfully, come home, with some difficulty. His being on the autism spectrum made his experience all the more magical. We went to see the film Donbas at the Intl Film Center in Greenwich Village. We prayed and worried and wrung our hands. And for the year following his return, I received emails from the ESL school director (in Armavir, just east of Ukraine) furiously blaming the U.S. for necessitating Putin's action which she swore would not be military aggression. I scoured the Internet to find historical connections to her proclamations. What I found were poor choices by Washington and a shitload of propaganda in her thinking, mixed in perfectly with valid accusations and fair complaints.
The world has bureaucrats and soundbites in place of actual world leaders because state leadership came from empires. The world wars were the last gasps of empires. The Cold War forced the answer to the existential questions. The options left to leaders is propaganda and billions to trillions spent on contained and proxy warfare.
I have a feeling that a concept in psychology, "lack of boundaries", is applicable to a world of developed and developing nations, as they are bound together through economic markets and trade, and unable to assert power through full-scale nuclear war. They find other ways to threaten, dominate and magnify their authority. The media is an effective, a perfect avenue. Thus we hear and see rhetoric and
agitprop. The threat of nuclear annihilation has removed stalwart boundaries of old, replacing them with bureaucratic sounding, mindless bites.
I am just guessing because I am not knowledgeable and Eastern Europe plus Southeast Europe is a hell of a history to try to grasp.
That's a fair point you raise here, esp. since I wrote in that piece:
'Russia isn’t a signatory to these agreements (which renders the repeated calls on Moscow to uphold these agreements by Western governments absurd)'
And that is a quite interesting assertion, which harks back to a Russian claim. You're correct about this ('even' Wikipedia brings this up), yet there's one other aspect to consider:
'In the end, despite the commitments made, the government in Kyiv did not shoulder the maintenance of the ruined areas of the self-proclaimed republics, as agreed upon.'
You're correct about the notion that Russia was a signatory, much like France and Germany (my understanding was/is as guarantor, but I'm aware of different views on this issue), as well as the OSCE.
In the end, I'm certain of one thing: there's many other aspects we know, don't know, and remain unknown at this point. I do like the 'lack of boundaries' notion, for I think it's quite apt, esp. after the end of the USSR.
He is saying that which Israeli leadership is thinking. Criminals! The fact that all Western governments went along with this crime shows you the level of penetration by globalist oligarchy and the important role Zionist elements are playing in that oligarchy.
It's also a playbook for not winning a conflict, for the leaders/founders of 'Hamas' aren't in Gaza (or in Iran, for that matter), but I just don't see the IDF bombing Qatar and Türkiye…
I suppose the penetration you allude to is about the same as the Covidian/WEF/WHO lunacy, which is to say that most Western politicians are going along for reasons that have to do with not wanting to be loners in the school yard…
Hamas is, in no small part, a creature of Israeli intelligence. Judging by the apparent lack of response from Israeli military, but with super ready propaganda campaign, I assume this was an engineered event.
Western politicians have very little agency. They are mostly puppets of the globalist oligarchy. All important decisions appear to be made within supra national organizations and governmental institutions directly controlled by the oligarchical structures. They are then implemented directly through deep state structures of individual countries. Politicians can then either rubber stamp those decision or commit political suicides. We can guess which option is more desirable for people drawn from the bottom of the barrel of humanity.
In the whole of Europe you will not find one de Gaul, in the US the last president who mentioned the danger of the military-industrial complex was Eisenhower. The current puppet in the White House is a demented moron, utterly compromised sorry excuse for a human being. All Five Eyes countries are similarly ‘penetrated’.
Laws are silent in times of war, as some greek or roman said long ago.
The general is not wrong (not talking morals here): if Israel is to be rid of Hamas, they must absorb the territory that is Gaza and displace its present population to Egypt, Jordan or Palestine.
Whether that is morally right or not is secondary if the goal is to rid Israel of Hamas and its hundreds of thousands of soldiers on their doorstep.
The reverse is of course that if Hamas is to have any chance to hurt Israel, it must murder civilians via terrorist methods, completely ignoring all the conventions and laws of war.
Which is why it is pointless to argue from a moral standpoint - there isn't one. (There never is, an objective one least of all, until the winner explains why the loser was evil.)
Also, why pick a side based on who is to be pitied the most? Why not pick based on who is a (potential) threat to you, and pick based on how one group or other behaves or has behaved in the past, referencing yourself and your own grouop?
Far more sensible approach than the endless splitting of hairs to find out who's the "good guys"; we should leave such stupidity to those americans who actually believe in such simplistic logic. Does it benefit Norway and the norwegians to support Hamas? Or palestinian arabs? Or does it benefit Norway more to support Israel? Or neither?
And consider this: by the logic used to condemn Israel by Hamas-supporters and dhimmi all over the West, Britain and the US shouldn't have bombed Germany at all during WW2: the munitions factories were staffed with civilians. Ridiculous.
And the flipside of that is, the british commando units engaging in "ungentlemanly warfare" (i.e. terrorism) inside Germany and German-occupied areas were war criminals and terrorists, just as Hamas is.
Tricky tricky it becomes, when one looks for morals in a practical issue.
This is, precisely, why I wrote the initial piece in mid-October.
I'm not naive enough to believe in 'morality' or the like, esp. in times of 'war', but I think I'm at least honest (enough, to myself) about it.
Txs a lot Epimetheus!
I wish you the best for 2024! Take care!
Tricky when one looks for overriding morals in war. What really is the meaning of "all is fair in love and war"? On the surface, the meaning is obvious.
On the other hand, in a democratic republic, leaders cannot wage war willy nilly. Furthermore, my attempt to generalize appears right away, to me, as silly. War by whom and in what century? They are all different. In the U.S.A. where Congress has the authority to send troops to war, no such authority was sought in any of our military actions since Viet Nam. That war ended when Congress said no more funds, this was a bad mistake and we didn't authorize it to begin with. I don't remember from history what authorized the U.S. military action in Korea.
To be simplistic, wars are a wager by the state, by heads of state, fought by its youth. Revolutions are attempted by the people. The protection of human rights written into the Constitution of the United States is not unique to the U.S. The human race evolved to that point in certain areas on the globe within a couple hundred years of one amother, while women did not have the right to vote in France until the 1950's. What's my point? The U.S.A. isn't an epitome of good or evil. Neither is any other national or cultural group even if certain cultures take the cake in my opinion when it comes to culture with a capital "C". Evil can be overcome by Good, Maybe, but stupidity, lies and resulting confusion make it impossible. Israel is in the odd position of having been granted their little piece of desert, rather than Zionists having had a country that formed within the Middle Ages or within early modern Europe, grabbing land through warfare as a pre-existing state. Almost every modern nation state came into being by some variation of brute force, statecraft, theft, lies, government controlled trade and ultimately taxation of its citizens. The rest is ideology taught to school children.
WW2 lies as in whitewashing the identity of the guys in the white hats and in the black hats?
See, e.g., this piece:
https://fackel.substack.com/p/in-these-times-a-8-9-may-2022-column
I appreciate your bold exposure of agitprop surrounding Ukraine but don't understand why you state the Russia did not sign the Minsk Accords. I followed the link you offered and see these names as signators:
Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, M. Yu. ZurabovA.W. Zakharchenko
I.W. Plotnitski
I don't understand the history of Eastern Europe, which, along with the history of middle Europe, is not taught in American colleges and universities, let alone in secondary educ. I take a great interest now in my retirement years having a British and Russian History Masters with which I did nothing professionally. (I made a personal comment previously on your substack about wanting to take back the Austrian identity that my parents lost when they fled to the U.S.]. When I found,
probably on Wiki, a historical narrative about the 20th c history of Yugoslavia and the involvement of the U.S., I was shocked at the history and dismayed that we The People of the United States know nothing about it.
Prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I had an adult child teaching ESL in southern Russia. I already had a deep love of Russian classical music and literature and was not surprised that my kid fell in love with the people and did not want to come back home. He did, thankfully, come home, with some difficulty. His being on the autism spectrum made his experience all the more magical. We went to see the film Donbas at the Intl Film Center in Greenwich Village. We prayed and worried and wrung our hands. And for the year following his return, I received emails from the ESL school director (in Armavir, just east of Ukraine) furiously blaming the U.S. for necessitating Putin's action which she swore would not be military aggression. I scoured the Internet to find historical connections to her proclamations. What I found were poor choices by Washington and a shitload of propaganda in her thinking, mixed in perfectly with valid accusations and fair complaints.
The world has bureaucrats and soundbites in place of actual world leaders because state leadership came from empires. The world wars were the last gasps of empires. The Cold War forced the answer to the existential questions. The options left to leaders is propaganda and billions to trillions spent on contained and proxy warfare.
I have a feeling that a concept in psychology, "lack of boundaries", is applicable to a world of developed and developing nations, as they are bound together through economic markets and trade, and unable to assert power through full-scale nuclear war. They find other ways to threaten, dominate and magnify their authority. The media is an effective, a perfect avenue. Thus we hear and see rhetoric and
agitprop. The threat of nuclear annihilation has removed stalwart boundaries of old, replacing them with bureaucratic sounding, mindless bites.
I am just guessing because I am not knowledgeable and Eastern Europe plus Southeast Europe is a hell of a history to try to grasp.
That's a fair point you raise here, esp. since I wrote in that piece:
'Russia isn’t a signatory to these agreements (which renders the repeated calls on Moscow to uphold these agreements by Western governments absurd)'
And that is a quite interesting assertion, which harks back to a Russian claim. You're correct about this ('even' Wikipedia brings this up), yet there's one other aspect to consider:
'In the end, despite the commitments made, the government in Kyiv did not shoulder the maintenance of the ruined areas of the self-proclaimed republics, as agreed upon.'
(Source: https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/through-ashes-minsk-agreements)
You're correct about the notion that Russia was a signatory, much like France and Germany (my understanding was/is as guarantor, but I'm aware of different views on this issue), as well as the OSCE.
In the end, I'm certain of one thing: there's many other aspects we know, don't know, and remain unknown at this point. I do like the 'lack of boundaries' notion, for I think it's quite apt, esp. after the end of the USSR.
What exactly are the moralising lies you refer to here?
"the moralising lies we in the West (and IN Russia) tell about WW2"
See my above comment and the other 8/9 May [2023] column linked in the above piece on Gen. Eiland.
After what the state of Israel did to its own population during the plandemonium, no amount of barbarity will surprise me in the least.
Same same, and I'm here to keep (some) receipts.
Sigh.
He is saying that which Israeli leadership is thinking. Criminals! The fact that all Western governments went along with this crime shows you the level of penetration by globalist oligarchy and the important role Zionist elements are playing in that oligarchy.
It looks like that, isn't it?
It's also a playbook for not winning a conflict, for the leaders/founders of 'Hamas' aren't in Gaza (or in Iran, for that matter), but I just don't see the IDF bombing Qatar and Türkiye…
I suppose the penetration you allude to is about the same as the Covidian/WEF/WHO lunacy, which is to say that most Western politicians are going along for reasons that have to do with not wanting to be loners in the school yard…
Hamas is, in no small part, a creature of Israeli intelligence. Judging by the apparent lack of response from Israeli military, but with super ready propaganda campaign, I assume this was an engineered event.
Western politicians have very little agency. They are mostly puppets of the globalist oligarchy. All important decisions appear to be made within supra national organizations and governmental institutions directly controlled by the oligarchical structures. They are then implemented directly through deep state structures of individual countries. Politicians can then either rubber stamp those decision or commit political suicides. We can guess which option is more desirable for people drawn from the bottom of the barrel of humanity.
In the whole of Europe you will not find one de Gaul, in the US the last president who mentioned the danger of the military-industrial complex was Eisenhower. The current puppet in the White House is a demented moron, utterly compromised sorry excuse for a human being. All Five Eyes countries are similarly ‘penetrated’.
Exactly.
If 'Israel' would want to go after Hamas' puppet-masters, well, where would they'd have to direct their forces?
You write: 'you will not find one de Gaul, in the US the last president who mentioned the danger of the military-industrial complex was Eisenhower'.
So true. Sigh.
Maybe it really is time to call a spade a spade (!)
What happens in Israel is the true face of zionist talmud FASCISM.
It’s the same satanic, destructive ideology that is at work here.
And it is very clear now:
—-> Fact is IDF are conscious, holocaust-aware, deliberate CHILD MURDERERS.
7.000 + children murdered in 7 weeks.
FACT.
Especially from Israelis playing the Holocaust card, you would expect justice and awareness of what their military does is deliberate CHILD GENOCIDE.
NO EXCUSES any longer for systemic, saranists who keep attacking anyone who calls them out.
IF Israeli jews do not start to protest against zionism, against talmud ideologies that promote child rape and child murder??
see: Rabbi Josef statements on how it is ok for jews to rape children from age 3 — as long as the victim is a non-jew (!)
(NB: 10% of entire Israeli population personally went to the funeral of this satanic criminal .. mind you (!)
That said.. what Israel does is the worst kind of athrocities against CHILDREN
People should realize by now that any support for Israeli Army IDF is de facto being an accomplice in GENOCIDE on 7.000 Gaza CHILDREN within weeks (!)
No excuses possible anymore —
the World is watching..
Message to all Christians supporting Israeli genocide. The Jews are not the ‘choosen people’..
Religious leaders who are preaching for Israel, should be held accountable for supporting genocide.
REMEMBER:
Zionists are imposters, they do NOT deserve any support from jewish people, neither from christian people.
“By the end of times, the world will be filled with lies and deception.
They operate on lies like the devil does.”
Remember the words of Christ “ye shall know them by their fruits” [Matt 7:16]
“I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars”
[Revelation 3:9]