There is a Western Empire and currently it is being run by the US and it wishes to retain it's grip over the world and has largely done this through disrupting any country that doesn't submit. For instance the 70 odd countries that have had their governments overthrown by US interference since World War 2, everyone from Australia to Venezuela and Vietnam.
There are plans in existence from various think-tanks in the US that project exactly what we see. The Rand Corporation has plans to weaken Russia via Ukraine, disrupt Iran via Israel and the script is largely being followed. I am sure that you are aware of this. Some including some of the authors have decried these plans , but they are being followed nevertheless. You can download these papers from their websites so it is not hidden at all.
How effective this all is, is a moot point, but the endeavour is there.
The purpose of the essay is to try to explain the mystery of the otherwise incomprehensible policies of the West towards Russia and China, including the apparently casual acceptance of the possibility of war. My argument is that the West is hypnotised by various historical myth cycles, without being aware of it. I describe some of these myths and give examples of how they have been alleged to apply at different times. I could have added others: space prevented me from dealing with the "Putin wants to conquer the world" example of the application of these myths, and of course there are many others as well. I'm primarily interested in how people through history have framed events in terms myths.
What distinguishes your position from many others is that you seem to be of the opinion that these myths also have their hold, completely, on the rulers of the Western World. Many people will concede that the general public is enthralled to mythos (but never them!) but they think that there are hard minded people at the top with no illusions, like the popular portrayals of Nixon and Kissinger. What you're basically claiming is that these people don't exist anymore, if they ever did, do I have that right?
Just as realism is among the most artificial of literary conventions, so those who pride themselves in seeing things as they really are, are often the slaves of myth. Nixon and Kissinger were certainly influenced by historical myths, and I doubt if there was a major political figure of the twentieth century (to keep it short) who wasn't.
Hello Aurelien, Thanks for clarifying the purpose in response to Chris Keating. I think that I experienced a lot of what you are discussing during the Covid Mandate Protest 'Convoy' here in Ottawa, Canada. It was clearly caused by making millions of Canadians second class citizens for avoiding a medical experiment in the Covid alleged 'vaccine'.
Opposing myths were chosen by both 'sides' to describe the other.
The Trudeau government was portrayed in the manner that the US Empire is in the Arab world (trying to control everything) and performing triple crosses by many that I spoke to. I always felt they gave those inept fools far too much credit.
On the other side the 'Convoy' protestors were portrayed as incomprehensibly Evil-y-Evilness and just making no sense whatsoever despite their very clear desires and wishes to stop being banned from everything from flying to restaurants
I see the same thing now with the student Gaza protests, nobody seems to be able to actually listen to what the student protestors are saying. They're just somehow automatically anti-Semites, not people who are appalled at the slaughter of innocents. And on the other side Israel and all Western governments (by extension) are treatment as purely motivated by Evil-y-Evilness not the disjointed and inept institutions they are.
If I agree with most of this essay (that is our leaders and actually, to some extend, most of the population, tend to life in a fantasy), I still hardly understand how the US being a empire could be mere myth ?...
If one define an empire by being a political confederation of various nations, ethnic groups or political entities under the rule of a central one which has the economic power, backed by superior military force when needed, to extract wealth from peripherical ones (at least as long as it is physically possible), the US seems to perfectly fit in.
I would rather think that the carefully constructed myth is that the US is NOT an empire.
Of course, that doesn't means that whoever run the empire (being headed by a formal emperor or not) are all powerful. Nor that some of these entities can be better treated than others. At least, as long as they keep in line. And I believe Germany (as one of the latest exemple) learned it the hard way when one of its critical infrastructure built without the empire approval was blown away 2 years ago. And wasn't even allowed to complain.
Maybe Aurelien meant hegemon... instead of empire. Obviously, there is the US empire, what are all those military bases all over the place, after all. But it is not a hegemon, that it is obvious to everyone. But what it is also obvious is the fact thet the US wants to be the hegemon and the only way it knows how to do that it is by corrupting the ruling elites and trying to convince them to become their (US's) compradros, with all the perks that fact entails, while just bending the knee - their dollar deposits in the US banks will always be safe...
I'm concerned with what people think, rather than some absolute reality, supposing it could be proven. It's not disputed that there are people who see the United States as the latest iteration of the Empire myth, just as there are others who apply it to Russia. I'm interested in myths and their effects, not debating whether the US is "actually" an Empire, which is a different question.
We don't know what actually people think, do we? What they purport to say they think is a different matter. I prefer to look at the actions, consequences, and the structures involved. All that small print stuff that people glaze over. I love Myths myself. A good storyteller, with people huddled around the campfire, at night, took the mind from present dangers and maybe hunger for thousands of generations of humans...
But now we are drowned in actual facts, and many of the actors cannot even help themselves and blurt out their intentions and their actions... Why not believe these things instead?
If you are not interested in "debating whether the US is "actually" an Empire", then it would be better not to have introduced the question in the first place. And the conclusion you arrive at (on the said question) is in any case wrong, and can be effectively argued to be so. But as you are not interested in such a debate, we can leave it at that. In any case, calling the US an empire is a very convenient and pretty accurate short-cut.
I introduced the question because some people see the US as an example of the Empire myth, and this influences their behaviour. I take no position on the underlying question, because it is essentially a tautologous argument. If your definition of Empire is wide enough to include the US along with the Persians and the Ottomans, then the US is, ipso facto, an Empire. Otherwise not.
But the funny thing with the US (and it was not so much an issue for earlier empires like the Roman ones), might be that they need to maintain 2 opposite myths at the same time : that they are not an empire for whoever live under their rules and that they are indeed a powerful empire for whoever willing to chalenge their hegemon.
I believe that all empires rule by corrupting the local elites by the way. That's how they work. I would even say that the less an empire need to rely on local elite corruption, the closer it comes to be a actual nation.
re: "Of course, such myths have to be absolute in nature. You can’t have a myth of a fairly powerful Cabal: by definition, an all-powerful Cabal has to control everything or it’s not all-powerful"
Undistributed middle term? IMO the "Epstein" saga shows that there is a "cabal" which tries to control some important events by controlling "important" people, and "Epstein's suicide" shows that that it is not all powerful. Ditto for the "Ukraine" and "Gaza" gambits of the same "cabal". The results were not what they probably envisioned. It is hard to discount the existence of a cabal when one reads the same story in a great majority of Western news outlets, and watch the excommunication and elimination of anyone who disagrees. Attributing all events to a random-walk problem with statistical aggregations here and there is an unsupported (weak) assumption.
I think there is room here for the view that there is no all-powerful Cabal because there are instead competing groups constantly grappling with one another for whatever slippery grip they can put on some of the levers of power such that none of them are ever completely successful in grasping them all.
I also came here to point out that the “all-powerful” cabal section was like setting up and taking apart a straw man. It’s easy to demonstrate that the Cabal is not all powerful.
But as with Epstein situation, we can look at other forms of influence - for example the USS Liberty was swept under a rug as an “incident”. Or that the US blocked over 50 UN resolutions against Israel. Or that AIPAC boasts of a 98-100% win rate of AIPAC sponsored candidates. Or that congressman Massie has recently revealed that just about every member of U.S. congress has an “AIPAC guy” to take direction from.
If you put these together, it does seem like there is a quite powerful Cabal that has attached itself to the centers of power and aims to control the US and at least parts of the world (Ukraine, Argentina, now Mexico).
I read all of your essays and have great respect for your capacity to lay out a point, and it surprised me that you never mentioned Israel in your essay. It would be highly relevant to know which myths are involved in its actions and the perception of Israel in the world.
Problem is, some - or even many - conspiracies really happened (and are happening). I'm pretty sure Watergate today would be summarily dismissed by the media, politicians, and the general public as a "conspiracy theory", with only a few dissident voices being smeared as nutjobs and put aside.
I believe (or rather want to believe) that what you're saying is that not everything is a conspiracy, *not* that nothing is a conspiracy. I think we can all agree that there isn't an all-powerful "Cabal" which is pulling all the imaginable strings throughout history. But I also think we can all agree that there are powerful groups who are able, through wealth, power, and influence, to exercise some control over how (or even what) events unfold.
The operative word here is "some": it's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Some things work, some don't. But powerful groups can always adapt, and this is one of the reasons for why they're powerful.
One example of how wealth, power, and influence can be used efficiently to advance particular interests is the sorry state of the "mainstream" media, which is fully owned by a handful of big corporations or depending (directly or indirectly) on the largesse of governments or political groups.
This means that the popular culture you rightly call attention to is indeed serving those interests (it doesn't matter if people who work in the media agree with this or not, or even if they don't believe it; at the end of the day, it all boils down to who can fire you, and why). Those people saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. This is a well-documented fact, and was planned - which doesn't mean that everything happened as planned. Adaptation is the key.
Truth is, many people have power, but very few people have an enormous amount of power. Do they manage to control everything and steer the course of history? No. Are they all part of a "cabal"? No. But they can do an awful lot of a damage. They're doing it right now.
Fascinating and useful as always, Aurelien. While it's hardly news that humankind depends on myth and narrative to make sense of life, and that these myths have cycles of predominance, it's helpful to draw out the counter arguments, as you have done. I agree with many of the commenters here that the US can be described currently, for all useful purposes, as an empire (in decline). I speak as a citizen of one of its manifest vassal states, Canada. But vassalage itself goes through cycles of greater or lesser degree, and anyway, your overall point, which relates to the current drumbeats of endless war, remains valid. And the myth of the "providential leader" also has its corollary in reality. Where there is a need, someone arises to fill it. If their efforts tend more or less in the direction of what is viewed as success, they are added to the body of the myth. If they don't, they disappear from the narrative. So over time, the list of such leaders gradually grows and the myth is validated.
IMO the point is not that every person is to an equal degree caught in the net of the myths, but whether the zeitgeist keeps it going. It is certainly doing so now. Presumably, sooner or later, we will come up against the realities you articulated a few weeks ago, and a modified narrative will either detour around the uncomfortable facts, or even, if the reality is harsh enough, flip to a new/old one.
I am reminded of an incident with our dog and a neighbour's. There was a chain fence between our yards, so the dogs kept up a vociferous war of threats and a dance of frustrated aggression whenever they caught sight of each other. One day, however, the fence had to be repaired, and a section of it was removed before we were aware of it. We watched the dogs doing their usual barking and growling and leaping at the fence at each other, running up and down the barrier. Suddenly they came to the point where the barrier had been removed. They both stopped, stared into the unprotected space for a moment, and then simultaneously retreated to the remaining section of fence, to continue their argument, running up and down in exactly the same way, but not going as far as the open section again.
I recognize that I am as gut-level dependent on some degree of myth, to make sense of much of what we don't understand, even as intellectually I keep trying to see through as many different sets of eyes as I can. Science is by definition dedicated to the observation and understanding of reality, even as its practitioners, being human, get ensnared with their own preferred narratives. It's not dishonesty so much as process, and in the case of science, it can take generations to break the hold of a narrative that long ago cracked under the weight of anomalies. So too, I keep hoping, will our attitude to war and power eventually give way to something less destructive. But history appears to make this the faintest of hopes.
Many thanks again - you start so many intriguing trains of thought - a weekly delight!
I largely agree, but you take it a step too far. The NED (but not necessarily usaid) is a cia spin off, that’s a verifiable fact. And meetings such as Davos exist for a practical reason, not to provide recreation for the most powerful people in the world. And the Trump shooter behaved professionally and the setup was complicated. He was trained by someone and there was some kind of organisation involved in the process.
You try to counter the false assumption that everything is organised by a small secret society by clinging to the equally false assumption that nothing is ever anything other than what we are told it is.
Which is probably the most basic and oldest myth of all: the myth of the all powerful ever caring global mother. For most of us that myth is based is based on a true story.
In reality there are all sorts of conspiracies, hidden agendas, secret societies (I used to be a member of one such group that physically confronted Nazis in the streets, no I’m not talking about antifa, we considered them clowns because they didn’t even have enough brains to keep their mouths shut) lies and deception. But they are often improvised, poorly organised, ill thought through, local and hugely unsuccessful.
And on Wittgenstein: I often use the quote in the same way, but tractus is a thorough investigation of structured language and thus of science. The meaning of the last sentence is literal: he is not talking about what is not or cannot be known, he is talking about what cannot be said — so what he established was the limits of science. Since scientists don’t like to hear anything about science having limitations (isn’t the myth of science the strongest myth particular to western society?) it’s seldom understood that way.
"I’ve discussed at some length elsewhere the teleological fervour that underpins European antagonism towards Russia, and why it will be more difficult for the Europeans than for the US to admit the war has been lost."
This rings soo true. Seeing the treatment Orban is getting from Brussels just for saying that the emperor has no clothes, and let's stop the killing, it is obvious that the elites got each a shard from Snow Queen's magic mirror in their eyes, and the rest just monkeys them as they are bound to do: just remember the black painting of teeth in the Japanese court (likely started to mollify an emperor with rotten teeth); or the white a la Isabelle (a not well washed queen of Castille maybe); or the Spanish lisp...
But one cannot contest the fact that the US is not only all about power
“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”
but also about the fact that they never had to contend with an adversary that matched them on their continent. Thus the Americans only want a total crushing victory and absolute surrender, same way the indian tribes were treated, same way Mexico was treated.
Is the following explanation of the Ukraine conflict my resorting to myths?
In 2014 the U.S. engineered a coup to install an anti-Russian government in Ukraine. The NATO alliance funded Ukraine's military. Zelenskyy expressed a desire for nuclear weapons at the Munich Conference in 2021.
Russia views these developments with alarm. (The U.S. would too if Mexico were petitioning Russia and China for weapons.)
Russia is well aware that it is a resource rich country. The West covets those resources.
The West has used Ukraine in a misguided attempt to weaken Russia's defensive capabilities. The West hopes when the last Ukrainian falls, the glorious March on Moscow can commence.
Not really. I think it's an allowable interpretation of the last ten years. Many would offer different interpretations, of course but that's always the case. On the other hand, we can see in this episode both echoes of the traditional western myth of the Barbarians to the East, and the traditional Russian myth of the blessed land always threatened with invasion, and these are factors in the politics of both side's policies.
Could we put probabilities on these allowable "interpretations", given the known facts as well as the known priors, which should be considered seriously - we treat this using Bayesian statistics?
All pretty much in line with my assessment of recent physical events & underlying financial & power aspects, but not nearly the whole story. Throw in a bunch of past wars, chaos & resulting bad blood, leading to the understandable (but futile) attempt to carve out their own niche country by some who's land had been swapped back & forth between empires & steam rolled by invading armies going both West and East several many times, all while being heavily taxed and conscripted/enslaved by "the flavor of the month" empires...
I do understand some of their motivations & can feel sympathy for those Western Ukrainian people, yet do not condone their murderous exploits (nor my own countries far larger ones). History is like a millstone around their necks and every other generation or so, some asshat with a grudge and/or a profit motive will always see an angle here.
the "myth of the Victim People". Some(SOME) ukrainians obviously suffer from this one. I mean... they aren't really a nation; they try to invent one out of a patchwork of regions and nationalities. So they need myths.
there are SOME ukr genuinely russophobic. How many? Looking at the time when they had elections - I'd say close to 50/50.
I doubt the US engineered anything. They seem to lean more towards the inept lately. The US(or those in US fond of the myths of final conflict/judgement) teamed up those ukr.
Mind you, need is a powerful thing. Russian and old ukr elites didn't leave much access to money for the russophobic group.
I mean, since ukr is close to default once every less than 10 years, probably the vast majority of people were genuinely against ianukovici in '14.
Sure, Russia could've waited one out and let the next iushcenko(I butchered his name 100%) break his neck. Since... ukr would've been in a crisis again in a couple of years; clockwork.
2. "russia viewed these developments with alarm" - more like they were pissed someone is on their turf? ;)
3. "Zelenskyy expressed a desire for nuclear weapons at the Munich Conference in 2021." - that's already fantasy. I'm 100% sure Russia will actually nuke ukr in such a case. And I'm 100% sure ukr understands this. Or at least invade and occupy(for real occupy - not like now)
4. "The West hopes when the last Ukrainian falls, the glorious March on Moscow can commence."
who marches? Russia would beat the crap out of nato on their home turf(vice versa also true).
After a week of waiting, wednesday has its pleasant moment with reading your essay, Aurelien. On this one, provided that I find your argument very convincing, I have a couple of issues that don't fit:
First, does that imply that our societies and nations have never experienced plots and assassinations driven by obscure groups seeking power? Is what you write equivalent to saying, for example, that Gladio and Stay Behind had no role whatsoever on the terrorist events of the 70s and 80s in Italy (part. the Moro kidnapping)? Should we accept history as it has been told?
Second, it is in effect puzzling to see our Powerful People behave as if narrative is all there is to reality....what if, on some level, they were actually right? What if there's nothing but narrative, out there, and on some level the ultimate fools are us: those die-hard old fashioned types convinced there's a reality somewhere and it will sooner or later exact its toll?
Just in case there is an ambiguity, this is not an essay about whether conspiracies exist or what happened at particular times. It's an essay about how people take events (real, questionable or imagined) and fit them into existing mythical frameworks, as a way of understanding the world. And yes, I do think (and have argued) that for some of our masters the narrative is all there is.
Actually, it seems that myths are a feature of humanity. After all, it is how we apprehend and rationalize reality. Or at least try to.
But problems can arise in 2 ways. Most myths, which all tend to endure for a relatively long time, end up diverging seriously from an often fleeting reality. So either they are taken as face value too long or they cannot be maintained long enough...
"The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies."
—Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo
(Quote is from Robert Shea/Anton Wilson: The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Illuminatus! #1-3)
About 45? Years ago, I read all 3 of 'em, then the subsequent Schrodinger's Cat trilogy where the same events generally had a diametrically opposite cause/effect, good people were evil & vice versa. Made a nice inoculant vs. this type of stuff going 'round in people's heads. Just the discernible facts, please. And try not to cherry pick which of those to even notice based on your pre conceptions & personal biases.
Of course, western intelligence agencies DO engage in actual conspiracies, people with large financial interests at stake certainly do as well!
In fact, my understanding of the USA's revolutionary war is that my country was split off politically from their (then legal & legitimate) rulers in Britain due to an absolutely illegal and treasonous conspiracy among a portion of the landed & wealthy/educated classes, who variously wanted to avoid taxation by their legitimate rulers to pay for European warfare they felt they derived little benefit from and had no parliamentary voice regarding and/or who desired to wield political power unconstrained by their Euro elders/betters and in their own fashion among their colonial neighbors. Several of those who put their signature on the declaration of Independence who later came into British custody were in fact executed for treason, those who hung them certainly considered them conspirators against their rightful king & empire.
Power & money will do just fine as incentives. Myths ARE quite useful for herding cats & avoiding (later) prosecution...
The colonists also didn't like all the peace treaties the British have signed with the natives, stopping the colonists to appropriate native lands. Washington got rich with land dealings as a surveyor,etc. And the Brits of course made peace because their soldiers were dying in the indian wars. The colonists were upset that their taxes, instead of killing indians, were used in other killings, overseas...
I was musing to myself recently how the infantile reaction of our Western "leaders" and "pundits" to whatever facts can be gleaned from the fog of war in Ukraine revealed that they are in the habit of reducing all conflicts to something one might encounter in a Marvel movie -- this essay provides some insight into how this sort of mentality comes to be across an arc of history much older and deeper than American superhero comics and their cinematic offspring, thanks.
"If the apocalyptic, almost Biblical, destruction of major cities by bombers never quite happened, historical myths equally cluster around things that did, or sort of did."
Well gas bombing as envisioned by Dohuet and the likes indeed did not happen (stockpiles were eventually prepared though) but once the capability to put several hundreds of four engines bombers on a city relatively unmolested finally became available the level of destruction that could be meted out was pretty much apocalyptic regardless. Places like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo were pretty much turned into a hellish nightmare.
That's why I specifically discussed the period 1939-40, when the technology was far behind the apocalyptic expectations, and the propaganda that said it would end the war in a week. Indeed, even at the end of the war, the material effect of bombing was much less than people at the time thought: large parts of Berlin were undamaged even in 1945. See Richard Evans, The Bombing War on this and other issues.
Now I know why that weird "male-female" Symbol stays near this pompous channel-name..
The Genius basically said, after cutting all the pseudo-intellectual Crap, that "the things are just coincident, uncontrolled and chaotic...none pushes any Agenda, it's a stupid thinking"-a "golden" Author indeed. How many times I saw the "It's a Gold, Moshe..."-Meme..? The Shills are really under every Rock.
With your choice of subject matter, you've struck gold,
Many of the points you made are quite good,
But,.... how to put it?
Learning in life is difficult. That you have emancipated yourself further than most of your colleagues mainstream journalists, and avoided the pitfall of moving to the opposite pole of the alternative media's arrant conspiratorialism and suspicionism, still leaves you with the mental equivalent of excess fat and slovenliness. That fatty slovenliness is visible in your continued adhering to what appears to be a columnistic practice of creating an ambiguity in order to entertain the audience, and in the process scoring cheap points against something legitimate. Here, the ambiguity is between falling prey to myths on one hand, and ascertaining a conspiracy of any kind on the other hand.
The former being a result of lack of virtue, the latter a result of virtuousness, makes it rather perverse.
The perversion - your writing perversion - is also glaring in your abuse of Wittgenstein:
"So for most commentators and pundits, it would be wise to adopt as a motto the final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: when you have nothing useful to say, STFU. "
Yuck: cynical vulgarity is a hallmark of things going wrong in one's mind. But, importantly, the said final proposition is treated as if it were a potential great wisdom, which it isn't: viz., Wittgenstein's final statement in his Lecture on Ethics.
To be clear, let me remove an ambiguity from my own writing: That these things are bad, does not mean they were done intentionally, or due to some 'personality disorder.' Far more likely is that they have happened due to a habit of mind, developed through a professional career, and after receiving countless rewards from readership that was too conservatively minded and lacking in rigor.
To finish with returning to the start:
Learning in life is difficult, and what makes it difficult is that one is too easily rewarded for something bad, and punished for attempting the good. So, it sounds appropriate to end on a note : keep trying to do well and reach the blue flower. In this column of yours, there are signs of true greatness, that it can be revised and turned into a classic to last for centuries and make you ~immortal.
Not one of your best essays Aurelian.
There is a Western Empire and currently it is being run by the US and it wishes to retain it's grip over the world and has largely done this through disrupting any country that doesn't submit. For instance the 70 odd countries that have had their governments overthrown by US interference since World War 2, everyone from Australia to Venezuela and Vietnam.
There are plans in existence from various think-tanks in the US that project exactly what we see. The Rand Corporation has plans to weaken Russia via Ukraine, disrupt Iran via Israel and the script is largely being followed. I am sure that you are aware of this. Some including some of the authors have decried these plans , but they are being followed nevertheless. You can download these papers from their websites so it is not hidden at all.
How effective this all is, is a moot point, but the endeavour is there.
The purpose of the essay is to try to explain the mystery of the otherwise incomprehensible policies of the West towards Russia and China, including the apparently casual acceptance of the possibility of war. My argument is that the West is hypnotised by various historical myth cycles, without being aware of it. I describe some of these myths and give examples of how they have been alleged to apply at different times. I could have added others: space prevented me from dealing with the "Putin wants to conquer the world" example of the application of these myths, and of course there are many others as well. I'm primarily interested in how people through history have framed events in terms myths.
What distinguishes your position from many others is that you seem to be of the opinion that these myths also have their hold, completely, on the rulers of the Western World. Many people will concede that the general public is enthralled to mythos (but never them!) but they think that there are hard minded people at the top with no illusions, like the popular portrayals of Nixon and Kissinger. What you're basically claiming is that these people don't exist anymore, if they ever did, do I have that right?
Just as realism is among the most artificial of literary conventions, so those who pride themselves in seeing things as they really are, are often the slaves of myth. Nixon and Kissinger were certainly influenced by historical myths, and I doubt if there was a major political figure of the twentieth century (to keep it short) who wasn't.
Hello Aurelien, Thanks for clarifying the purpose in response to Chris Keating. I think that I experienced a lot of what you are discussing during the Covid Mandate Protest 'Convoy' here in Ottawa, Canada. It was clearly caused by making millions of Canadians second class citizens for avoiding a medical experiment in the Covid alleged 'vaccine'.
Opposing myths were chosen by both 'sides' to describe the other.
The Trudeau government was portrayed in the manner that the US Empire is in the Arab world (trying to control everything) and performing triple crosses by many that I spoke to. I always felt they gave those inept fools far too much credit.
On the other side the 'Convoy' protestors were portrayed as incomprehensibly Evil-y-Evilness and just making no sense whatsoever despite their very clear desires and wishes to stop being banned from everything from flying to restaurants
I see the same thing now with the student Gaza protests, nobody seems to be able to actually listen to what the student protestors are saying. They're just somehow automatically anti-Semites, not people who are appalled at the slaughter of innocents. And on the other side Israel and all Western governments (by extension) are treatment as purely motivated by Evil-y-Evilness not the disjointed and inept institutions they are.
Please keep it up!
If I agree with most of this essay (that is our leaders and actually, to some extend, most of the population, tend to life in a fantasy), I still hardly understand how the US being a empire could be mere myth ?...
If one define an empire by being a political confederation of various nations, ethnic groups or political entities under the rule of a central one which has the economic power, backed by superior military force when needed, to extract wealth from peripherical ones (at least as long as it is physically possible), the US seems to perfectly fit in.
I would rather think that the carefully constructed myth is that the US is NOT an empire.
Of course, that doesn't means that whoever run the empire (being headed by a formal emperor or not) are all powerful. Nor that some of these entities can be better treated than others. At least, as long as they keep in line. And I believe Germany (as one of the latest exemple) learned it the hard way when one of its critical infrastructure built without the empire approval was blown away 2 years ago. And wasn't even allowed to complain.
Maybe Aurelien meant hegemon... instead of empire. Obviously, there is the US empire, what are all those military bases all over the place, after all. But it is not a hegemon, that it is obvious to everyone. But what it is also obvious is the fact thet the US wants to be the hegemon and the only way it knows how to do that it is by corrupting the ruling elites and trying to convince them to become their (US's) compradros, with all the perks that fact entails, while just bending the knee - their dollar deposits in the US banks will always be safe...
I'm concerned with what people think, rather than some absolute reality, supposing it could be proven. It's not disputed that there are people who see the United States as the latest iteration of the Empire myth, just as there are others who apply it to Russia. I'm interested in myths and their effects, not debating whether the US is "actually" an Empire, which is a different question.
We don't know what actually people think, do we? What they purport to say they think is a different matter. I prefer to look at the actions, consequences, and the structures involved. All that small print stuff that people glaze over. I love Myths myself. A good storyteller, with people huddled around the campfire, at night, took the mind from present dangers and maybe hunger for thousands of generations of humans...
But now we are drowned in actual facts, and many of the actors cannot even help themselves and blurt out their intentions and their actions... Why not believe these things instead?
If you are not interested in "debating whether the US is "actually" an Empire", then it would be better not to have introduced the question in the first place. And the conclusion you arrive at (on the said question) is in any case wrong, and can be effectively argued to be so. But as you are not interested in such a debate, we can leave it at that. In any case, calling the US an empire is a very convenient and pretty accurate short-cut.
I introduced the question because some people see the US as an example of the Empire myth, and this influences their behaviour. I take no position on the underlying question, because it is essentially a tautologous argument. If your definition of Empire is wide enough to include the US along with the Persians and the Ottomans, then the US is, ipso facto, an Empire. Otherwise not.
Maybe…
But the funny thing with the US (and it was not so much an issue for earlier empires like the Roman ones), might be that they need to maintain 2 opposite myths at the same time : that they are not an empire for whoever live under their rules and that they are indeed a powerful empire for whoever willing to chalenge their hegemon.
I believe that all empires rule by corrupting the local elites by the way. That's how they work. I would even say that the less an empire need to rely on local elite corruption, the closer it comes to be a actual nation.
re: "Of course, such myths have to be absolute in nature. You can’t have a myth of a fairly powerful Cabal: by definition, an all-powerful Cabal has to control everything or it’s not all-powerful"
Undistributed middle term? IMO the "Epstein" saga shows that there is a "cabal" which tries to control some important events by controlling "important" people, and "Epstein's suicide" shows that that it is not all powerful. Ditto for the "Ukraine" and "Gaza" gambits of the same "cabal". The results were not what they probably envisioned. It is hard to discount the existence of a cabal when one reads the same story in a great majority of Western news outlets, and watch the excommunication and elimination of anyone who disagrees. Attributing all events to a random-walk problem with statistical aggregations here and there is an unsupported (weak) assumption.
I think there is room here for the view that there is no all-powerful Cabal because there are instead competing groups constantly grappling with one another for whatever slippery grip they can put on some of the levers of power such that none of them are ever completely successful in grasping them all.
I also came here to point out that the “all-powerful” cabal section was like setting up and taking apart a straw man. It’s easy to demonstrate that the Cabal is not all powerful.
But as with Epstein situation, we can look at other forms of influence - for example the USS Liberty was swept under a rug as an “incident”. Or that the US blocked over 50 UN resolutions against Israel. Or that AIPAC boasts of a 98-100% win rate of AIPAC sponsored candidates. Or that congressman Massie has recently revealed that just about every member of U.S. congress has an “AIPAC guy” to take direction from.
If you put these together, it does seem like there is a quite powerful Cabal that has attached itself to the centers of power and aims to control the US and at least parts of the world (Ukraine, Argentina, now Mexico).
I read all of your essays and have great respect for your capacity to lay out a point, and it surprised me that you never mentioned Israel in your essay. It would be highly relevant to know which myths are involved in its actions and the perception of Israel in the world.
Problem is, some - or even many - conspiracies really happened (and are happening). I'm pretty sure Watergate today would be summarily dismissed by the media, politicians, and the general public as a "conspiracy theory", with only a few dissident voices being smeared as nutjobs and put aside.
I believe (or rather want to believe) that what you're saying is that not everything is a conspiracy, *not* that nothing is a conspiracy. I think we can all agree that there isn't an all-powerful "Cabal" which is pulling all the imaginable strings throughout history. But I also think we can all agree that there are powerful groups who are able, through wealth, power, and influence, to exercise some control over how (or even what) events unfold.
The operative word here is "some": it's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Some things work, some don't. But powerful groups can always adapt, and this is one of the reasons for why they're powerful.
One example of how wealth, power, and influence can be used efficiently to advance particular interests is the sorry state of the "mainstream" media, which is fully owned by a handful of big corporations or depending (directly or indirectly) on the largesse of governments or political groups.
This means that the popular culture you rightly call attention to is indeed serving those interests (it doesn't matter if people who work in the media agree with this or not, or even if they don't believe it; at the end of the day, it all boils down to who can fire you, and why). Those people saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. This is a well-documented fact, and was planned - which doesn't mean that everything happened as planned. Adaptation is the key.
Truth is, many people have power, but very few people have an enormous amount of power. Do they manage to control everything and steer the course of history? No. Are they all part of a "cabal"? No. But they can do an awful lot of a damage. They're doing it right now.
Fascinating and useful as always, Aurelien. While it's hardly news that humankind depends on myth and narrative to make sense of life, and that these myths have cycles of predominance, it's helpful to draw out the counter arguments, as you have done. I agree with many of the commenters here that the US can be described currently, for all useful purposes, as an empire (in decline). I speak as a citizen of one of its manifest vassal states, Canada. But vassalage itself goes through cycles of greater or lesser degree, and anyway, your overall point, which relates to the current drumbeats of endless war, remains valid. And the myth of the "providential leader" also has its corollary in reality. Where there is a need, someone arises to fill it. If their efforts tend more or less in the direction of what is viewed as success, they are added to the body of the myth. If they don't, they disappear from the narrative. So over time, the list of such leaders gradually grows and the myth is validated.
IMO the point is not that every person is to an equal degree caught in the net of the myths, but whether the zeitgeist keeps it going. It is certainly doing so now. Presumably, sooner or later, we will come up against the realities you articulated a few weeks ago, and a modified narrative will either detour around the uncomfortable facts, or even, if the reality is harsh enough, flip to a new/old one.
I am reminded of an incident with our dog and a neighbour's. There was a chain fence between our yards, so the dogs kept up a vociferous war of threats and a dance of frustrated aggression whenever they caught sight of each other. One day, however, the fence had to be repaired, and a section of it was removed before we were aware of it. We watched the dogs doing their usual barking and growling and leaping at the fence at each other, running up and down the barrier. Suddenly they came to the point where the barrier had been removed. They both stopped, stared into the unprotected space for a moment, and then simultaneously retreated to the remaining section of fence, to continue their argument, running up and down in exactly the same way, but not going as far as the open section again.
I recognize that I am as gut-level dependent on some degree of myth, to make sense of much of what we don't understand, even as intellectually I keep trying to see through as many different sets of eyes as I can. Science is by definition dedicated to the observation and understanding of reality, even as its practitioners, being human, get ensnared with their own preferred narratives. It's not dishonesty so much as process, and in the case of science, it can take generations to break the hold of a narrative that long ago cracked under the weight of anomalies. So too, I keep hoping, will our attitude to war and power eventually give way to something less destructive. But history appears to make this the faintest of hopes.
Many thanks again - you start so many intriguing trains of thought - a weekly delight!
I largely agree, but you take it a step too far. The NED (but not necessarily usaid) is a cia spin off, that’s a verifiable fact. And meetings such as Davos exist for a practical reason, not to provide recreation for the most powerful people in the world. And the Trump shooter behaved professionally and the setup was complicated. He was trained by someone and there was some kind of organisation involved in the process.
You try to counter the false assumption that everything is organised by a small secret society by clinging to the equally false assumption that nothing is ever anything other than what we are told it is.
Which is probably the most basic and oldest myth of all: the myth of the all powerful ever caring global mother. For most of us that myth is based is based on a true story.
In reality there are all sorts of conspiracies, hidden agendas, secret societies (I used to be a member of one such group that physically confronted Nazis in the streets, no I’m not talking about antifa, we considered them clowns because they didn’t even have enough brains to keep their mouths shut) lies and deception. But they are often improvised, poorly organised, ill thought through, local and hugely unsuccessful.
And on Wittgenstein: I often use the quote in the same way, but tractus is a thorough investigation of structured language and thus of science. The meaning of the last sentence is literal: he is not talking about what is not or cannot be known, he is talking about what cannot be said — so what he established was the limits of science. Since scientists don’t like to hear anything about science having limitations (isn’t the myth of science the strongest myth particular to western society?) it’s seldom understood that way.
No, I don't think the opposite of a bad idea is necessarily another idea. Obviously, some things are connected, and understood to be so.
Humans are always chasing after foolish myths, always inventing explanations that don't pan out.
That doesn't mean that they will face reality this time around. Quite the opposite, in fact, they will rage at anyone who points out their folly.
"I’ve discussed at some length elsewhere the teleological fervour that underpins European antagonism towards Russia, and why it will be more difficult for the Europeans than for the US to admit the war has been lost."
This rings soo true. Seeing the treatment Orban is getting from Brussels just for saying that the emperor has no clothes, and let's stop the killing, it is obvious that the elites got each a shard from Snow Queen's magic mirror in their eyes, and the rest just monkeys them as they are bound to do: just remember the black painting of teeth in the Japanese court (likely started to mollify an emperor with rotten teeth); or the white a la Isabelle (a not well washed queen of Castille maybe); or the Spanish lisp...
But one cannot contest the fact that the US is not only all about power
“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”
but also about the fact that they never had to contend with an adversary that matched them on their continent. Thus the Americans only want a total crushing victory and absolute surrender, same way the indian tribes were treated, same way Mexico was treated.
Is the following explanation of the Ukraine conflict my resorting to myths?
In 2014 the U.S. engineered a coup to install an anti-Russian government in Ukraine. The NATO alliance funded Ukraine's military. Zelenskyy expressed a desire for nuclear weapons at the Munich Conference in 2021.
Russia views these developments with alarm. (The U.S. would too if Mexico were petitioning Russia and China for weapons.)
Russia is well aware that it is a resource rich country. The West covets those resources.
The West has used Ukraine in a misguided attempt to weaken Russia's defensive capabilities. The West hopes when the last Ukrainian falls, the glorious March on Moscow can commence.
Not really. I think it's an allowable interpretation of the last ten years. Many would offer different interpretations, of course but that's always the case. On the other hand, we can see in this episode both echoes of the traditional western myth of the Barbarians to the East, and the traditional Russian myth of the blessed land always threatened with invasion, and these are factors in the politics of both side's policies.
Could we put probabilities on these allowable "interpretations", given the known facts as well as the known priors, which should be considered seriously - we treat this using Bayesian statistics?
@the suck of sorrow
All pretty much in line with my assessment of recent physical events & underlying financial & power aspects, but not nearly the whole story. Throw in a bunch of past wars, chaos & resulting bad blood, leading to the understandable (but futile) attempt to carve out their own niche country by some who's land had been swapped back & forth between empires & steam rolled by invading armies going both West and East several many times, all while being heavily taxed and conscripted/enslaved by "the flavor of the month" empires...
I do understand some of their motivations & can feel sympathy for those Western Ukrainian people, yet do not condone their murderous exploits (nor my own countries far larger ones). History is like a millstone around their necks and every other generation or so, some asshat with a grudge and/or a profit motive will always see an angle here.
partially it resorts to myths:
1. "engineered a coup"
the "myth of the Victim People". Some(SOME) ukrainians obviously suffer from this one. I mean... they aren't really a nation; they try to invent one out of a patchwork of regions and nationalities. So they need myths.
there are SOME ukr genuinely russophobic. How many? Looking at the time when they had elections - I'd say close to 50/50.
I doubt the US engineered anything. They seem to lean more towards the inept lately. The US(or those in US fond of the myths of final conflict/judgement) teamed up those ukr.
Mind you, need is a powerful thing. Russian and old ukr elites didn't leave much access to money for the russophobic group.
I mean, since ukr is close to default once every less than 10 years, probably the vast majority of people were genuinely against ianukovici in '14.
Sure, Russia could've waited one out and let the next iushcenko(I butchered his name 100%) break his neck. Since... ukr would've been in a crisis again in a couple of years; clockwork.
2. "russia viewed these developments with alarm" - more like they were pissed someone is on their turf? ;)
3. "Zelenskyy expressed a desire for nuclear weapons at the Munich Conference in 2021." - that's already fantasy. I'm 100% sure Russia will actually nuke ukr in such a case. And I'm 100% sure ukr understands this. Or at least invade and occupy(for real occupy - not like now)
4. "The West hopes when the last Ukrainian falls, the glorious March on Moscow can commence."
who marches? Russia would beat the crap out of nato on their home turf(vice versa also true).
After a week of waiting, wednesday has its pleasant moment with reading your essay, Aurelien. On this one, provided that I find your argument very convincing, I have a couple of issues that don't fit:
First, does that imply that our societies and nations have never experienced plots and assassinations driven by obscure groups seeking power? Is what you write equivalent to saying, for example, that Gladio and Stay Behind had no role whatsoever on the terrorist events of the 70s and 80s in Italy (part. the Moro kidnapping)? Should we accept history as it has been told?
Second, it is in effect puzzling to see our Powerful People behave as if narrative is all there is to reality....what if, on some level, they were actually right? What if there's nothing but narrative, out there, and on some level the ultimate fools are us: those die-hard old fashioned types convinced there's a reality somewhere and it will sooner or later exact its toll?
Just in case there is an ambiguity, this is not an essay about whether conspiracies exist or what happened at particular times. It's an essay about how people take events (real, questionable or imagined) and fit them into existing mythical frameworks, as a way of understanding the world. And yes, I do think (and have argued) that for some of our masters the narrative is all there is.
Actually, it seems that myths are a feature of humanity. After all, it is how we apprehend and rationalize reality. Or at least try to.
But problems can arise in 2 ways. Most myths, which all tend to endure for a relatively long time, end up diverging seriously from an often fleeting reality. So either they are taken as face value too long or they cannot be maintained long enough...
"The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies."
—Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo
(Quote is from Robert Shea/Anton Wilson: The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Illuminatus! #1-3)
About 45? Years ago, I read all 3 of 'em, then the subsequent Schrodinger's Cat trilogy where the same events generally had a diametrically opposite cause/effect, good people were evil & vice versa. Made a nice inoculant vs. this type of stuff going 'round in people's heads. Just the discernible facts, please. And try not to cherry pick which of those to even notice based on your pre conceptions & personal biases.
Of course, western intelligence agencies DO engage in actual conspiracies, people with large financial interests at stake certainly do as well!
In fact, my understanding of the USA's revolutionary war is that my country was split off politically from their (then legal & legitimate) rulers in Britain due to an absolutely illegal and treasonous conspiracy among a portion of the landed & wealthy/educated classes, who variously wanted to avoid taxation by their legitimate rulers to pay for European warfare they felt they derived little benefit from and had no parliamentary voice regarding and/or who desired to wield political power unconstrained by their Euro elders/betters and in their own fashion among their colonial neighbors. Several of those who put their signature on the declaration of Independence who later came into British custody were in fact executed for treason, those who hung them certainly considered them conspirators against their rightful king & empire.
Power & money will do just fine as incentives. Myths ARE quite useful for herding cats & avoiding (later) prosecution...
The colonists also didn't like all the peace treaties the British have signed with the natives, stopping the colonists to appropriate native lands. Washington got rich with land dealings as a surveyor,etc. And the Brits of course made peace because their soldiers were dying in the indian wars. The colonists were upset that their taxes, instead of killing indians, were used in other killings, overseas...
I was musing to myself recently how the infantile reaction of our Western "leaders" and "pundits" to whatever facts can be gleaned from the fog of war in Ukraine revealed that they are in the habit of reducing all conflicts to something one might encounter in a Marvel movie -- this essay provides some insight into how this sort of mentality comes to be across an arc of history much older and deeper than American superhero comics and their cinematic offspring, thanks.
Great essay! Although, I'm wondering whether realizing other people's hypnotizations with historical myth allows oneself to be alleviated from it.
"If the apocalyptic, almost Biblical, destruction of major cities by bombers never quite happened, historical myths equally cluster around things that did, or sort of did."
Well gas bombing as envisioned by Dohuet and the likes indeed did not happen (stockpiles were eventually prepared though) but once the capability to put several hundreds of four engines bombers on a city relatively unmolested finally became available the level of destruction that could be meted out was pretty much apocalyptic regardless. Places like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo were pretty much turned into a hellish nightmare.
That's why I specifically discussed the period 1939-40, when the technology was far behind the apocalyptic expectations, and the propaganda that said it would end the war in a week. Indeed, even at the end of the war, the material effect of bombing was much less than people at the time thought: large parts of Berlin were undamaged even in 1945. See Richard Evans, The Bombing War on this and other issues.
Now I know why that weird "male-female" Symbol stays near this pompous channel-name..
The Genius basically said, after cutting all the pseudo-intellectual Crap, that "the things are just coincident, uncontrolled and chaotic...none pushes any Agenda, it's a stupid thinking"-a "golden" Author indeed. How many times I saw the "It's a Gold, Moshe..."-Meme..? The Shills are really under every Rock.
It's the astrological symbol of Mercury, god of writing and communication.
@Aurelian
Also of alchemists, physicians, traders... and tricksters.
This article left me the following impression:
With your choice of subject matter, you've struck gold,
Many of the points you made are quite good,
But,.... how to put it?
Learning in life is difficult. That you have emancipated yourself further than most of your colleagues mainstream journalists, and avoided the pitfall of moving to the opposite pole of the alternative media's arrant conspiratorialism and suspicionism, still leaves you with the mental equivalent of excess fat and slovenliness. That fatty slovenliness is visible in your continued adhering to what appears to be a columnistic practice of creating an ambiguity in order to entertain the audience, and in the process scoring cheap points against something legitimate. Here, the ambiguity is between falling prey to myths on one hand, and ascertaining a conspiracy of any kind on the other hand.
The former being a result of lack of virtue, the latter a result of virtuousness, makes it rather perverse.
The perversion - your writing perversion - is also glaring in your abuse of Wittgenstein:
"So for most commentators and pundits, it would be wise to adopt as a motto the final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: when you have nothing useful to say, STFU. "
Yuck: cynical vulgarity is a hallmark of things going wrong in one's mind. But, importantly, the said final proposition is treated as if it were a potential great wisdom, which it isn't: viz., Wittgenstein's final statement in his Lecture on Ethics.
To be clear, let me remove an ambiguity from my own writing: That these things are bad, does not mean they were done intentionally, or due to some 'personality disorder.' Far more likely is that they have happened due to a habit of mind, developed through a professional career, and after receiving countless rewards from readership that was too conservatively minded and lacking in rigor.
To finish with returning to the start:
Learning in life is difficult, and what makes it difficult is that one is too easily rewarded for something bad, and punished for attempting the good. So, it sounds appropriate to end on a note : keep trying to do well and reach the blue flower. In this column of yours, there are signs of true greatness, that it can be revised and turned into a classic to last for centuries and make you ~immortal.