“There is a shortage of blood in Gaza” screams a news headline. Is one reminded of the latest Hollywood vampire film? Or, is one so in touch with the real-life horrors and tragedies of world society, that one thinks of immense, and urgent, human casualty-care needs in the tiny Palestinian enclave besieged by Israel for decades?
Most readers will probably think it uncouth to even suggest a comparison with cinema. But they are an audience of the Global South (or Third World) news media. Such audiences are directly concerned about Palestine and West Asia as a whole because their lives (in terms of volatile fuel, food prices) and, the lives of their friends and kin (working in West Asia), are dependent on the events in that war-torn, highly unstable, region.
Populations of the Global North (First World), however, hardly know of the human and infra-structural devastation and, scale of bloodshed in West Asia, leave aside the specifically genocidal situation of Palestine.
That is because the bulk of the Global North population has no direct link with what goes on in West Asia. Their news media, if reporting bloodshed at all, focuses on local serial killers, gun violence, and the rare cases of anti-White, pro-Palestinian, rage acts by non-White immigrants or refugees from West Asia.
In a very real (bloody) sense, the Global North public’s ignorance about and, even (psycho-pathological?) deliberate or, half-conscious, ignoring of, the terrible, inhuman – nay criminal – waging of war against Palestine and its Arab-Muslim allies, helps perpetuate that West Asian crisis.
Horrific repercussions
If the First World public knew or, was compelled to acknowledge, the horrific repercussions of their own Governments’ collective complicity in the West Asia wars, it is very likely that European (if not, American) civilisation would react differently.
From the depths of Europe’s substantive (once colonially enriched) civilisation there could likely emerge political dissent and disgust that could restrain the current aggression being done in European Civilisation’s name by the small, late 20th Century, colonial community that conveniently labels itself ‘Israel’.
Such is a quick sum-up of current global political attitudes and ensuing politics and geopolitics, the subject of this column. Any understanding of a State’s behaviour in inter-State relations must include some level of understanding of the domestic (intra or sub-State) dynamics within each State and its society. Differing social groups within a State’s society could have somewhat differing, if not antagonistic, interests in relation to their State’s policies and practices on the international plane.
Thus, at an international level, a State may make a mix of public statements only some of which are actually in consonance with that State’s geopolitical actions. State leaders are known to have said one thing and gone on to do the opposite. A government’s or, Governmental leader’s, public statements on any matter do not necessarily precisely correspond with what that Government is actually doing in relation to that matter.
Sometimes, you get particularly maverick national leaders, like US President Donald Trump, who neither knows formal diplomacy nor cares about it, especially when the culture he operates within enables him to mobilise popular credibility on the very basis of undiplomatic style.
Hence, President Trump’s bluff declarations about a translocation of the entire Gaza population, even though neither the US nor its Western allies will attempt to actually enforce such a wholesale population expulsion on the ground. But such sweeping pronouncements are exactly what Trump’s core voting constituencies as well as what his allied Radical Right political movements like.
Grandiose declarations
For Trump’s larger Make America Great Again (MAGA) constituencies, all yearning for anything that feels or looks like American ‘Greatness’, such grandiose declarations are perfect stimulants. And like other, more successful, fascistic political movements elsewhere – in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy – such stimulants brought votes to victory. Trump’s attendant Radical Right advisers and spin-doctors constantly feed him such talking points.
The critical dynamic is that such bluster is in defiance of prevailing norms, local and global. Such deviance is a defiance, a blunt projection of America and Americans as being above and beyond ‘norms’ of any kind. Americans who yearn to be “great again”, actually want to feel even more ‘great’ than they think they already are – that is big, dominant, powerful, admired, worshipped, envied.
With the end of direct colonial dominance, other nations and regions are quickly becoming almost as powerful, nearly as glamorous, almost as rich or, showing possibilities of becoming even ‘greater’ (China?). And, this undermines America’s stature.
America’s self-perception of its stature is of one that is self-made. It is quite distinct from colonial Europe’s continental imperialist (Greek, Roman, Teutonic, Carolingian) foundation from which Colonialism was then imposed worldwide. The White North America is not the direct successor of any European empire such as the British or French or Spanish.
Thus, the American sense of a unique ‘manifest destiny’ as a result of the building of their own continental State with little help from any one European imperial State. They are a mix of European settlers who then built up and expanded their own ethnically (yet European) hybrid new empire – a kind of ‘extra-European’ empire.
Ever since American industrial power made it the saving factor in the First and Second World Wars, the USA has seen its sense of ‘manifest destiny’ affirmed globally. It seemed very ‘natural’ that the most powerful nation emerging from World War II should then lead the world in building an order of global ‘peace’.
Now, after seventy-plus years of NATO and American triumph in the Cold War, the persistent emergence of the former colonised nations (including China) on to the world stage, is what fuels the persistent American desire to be ‘great’ – that is, ‘the greatest’.
Since the emergence of the Global South is an inhibitor to that one-time US dominance, the nature of that dominance needs to be modified in order that that sense of ‘greatness’ continues. For the Radical Right, with its limited understanding of global-scale geopolitics, what is being posited is a regressive greatness.
For popular, White Supremacists, America, it is not enough for America to be part of an interdependent bloc of Western powers in a coordinated, continued, global dominance – i.e. NATO and G7. For the colonially experienced Europeans, such coordination of power is crucial for dominance over the global system, especially when it is obvious that rival emerging powers are, themselves, prone to their own geopolitical coordination in their assertion of power.
But for the Americans, isolated as they are in their secluded continent, and lacking that experience of colonial coordination, their unilateral exercise of power is the more visible indicator of greatness. White America wants to be more visible as a world power on its own rather than as part of NATO or even dominating the United Nations.
Hence, the dramatic revival of US unilateralism. The new Radical Right Washington’s current geopolitics is all about such unilateralism. In the past week, the US carried out over fifty aerial bombing raids on starving, disease-ridden, but defiant Yemen.
And, American-armed and financed proxy, Israel’s Occupation forces attacked over 40 villages and refugee-crowded (and impoverished) towns in Palestine’s West Bank, even as Israel continued its bombing and shelling of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
