#geopolitical analysis

[kesarijournal]

Unmasking the Puppeteers: How U.S. Government-Funded Analysts Shape South Asia's Narrative

In the swirling world of geopolitics, the narratives we consume often come from voices we trust. But what if those voices, presenting themselves as independent experts, are subtly tethered to the very governments they discuss? It’s time to pull back the curtain on two of the most influential American pundits on South Asia, Derek Grossman and Michael Kugelman, and expose the hidden strings of U.S.…

[tinakp]

Only Trust Yourself | All Governments Lie and The Media Too | Alexander Mercouris from The Duran

It's my pleasure to talk to Alexander Mercouris ( @AlexMercouris  ) from the Duran Youtube Channel:  @TheDuran . In this first segment we talk about his work at his channels, how he does his research, and what kind of news he trusts. Spoiler alert: reasonable people vet every piece of information, trust nothing, and think for themselves.

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇱🇺🇲 🚨

BIG FAT CRYING ISRAELI BABY BEGS UNCLE SAM FOR MORE BOMBS, LESS RESTRICTIONS

In bizarre series of events on Thursday, when the Israeli entity's psychotic Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the Neocon administration of Genocide Joe Biden of imposing unfair restrictions, bottlenecking munitions deliveries, and slow rolling arms sales for the Zionist occupation army.

The accusations seem to have been made out of a desire for speeding up the genocide in the Gaza Strip, because murdering nearly 40'000 Palestinians in 9 months doesn't seem to be resulting in the rapid ethnic cleansing of Gaza the Zionist Prime Minister was hoping for.

Netanyahu began his toddler fit with false praise for the Genocide Joe administration, telling reporters in English that “When Secretary Blinken was recently here in Israel, we had a candid conversation. I said I deeply appreciated the support the US has given Israel from the beginning of the war."

Almost immediately, Netanyahu's praise became a backhanded complement when he added, “But I also said something else, I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel..."

"Israel," he said again in faux disbelief, "America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.”

"Secretary Blinken assured me that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks,” the crying man-baby-in-chief continued, adding that “I certainly hope that’s the case. It should be the case.”

But Netanyahu didn't stop there, the Psychopathic-man-baby-in-Chief reportedly accused the Genocide Joe administration of playing into the hands of Iran and its "proxies in the region", including Hamas and Hezbollah, by slowing munitions deliveries.

Asked about the man-baby's breakdown, US Secretary of Murder at the State Department, Antony Blinken, suggested the Zionist occupation's leader was exaggerating, and insisted only a single delivery has been held up.

The top war-mongering diplomat in the State Department went on, pointing to the one shipment the self-propelled grandpa mentioned in a press conference in Washington over a month ago.

"We are continuing to review one shipment that President [Genocide Joe] Biden has talked about with regard to 2000-pound bombs because of our concerns about their use in a densely populated area like Rafah. That remains under review,” Blinken said of the shipment.

"But everything else is moving as it normally would move… with the perspective of making sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself against this multiplicity of challenges [it faces],” the Chief State Department war profiteer added.

When pressed about the issue in a later press conference, the blood-soaked-White-House spokeswoman and terrible-at-her-job-of-being-an-expert-liar, Karine Jean-Pierre, added that "We genuinely do not know what he’s talking about. We just don’t."

Clearly uncomfortable and aware that many of Genocide Joe's voters reject the Zionist genocide in Gaza, but equally conscious of the psychopathic and maniacal flippancy of her counterparts in the Israeli entity, Karine Jean-Pierre added that "There was one particular shipment of munitions that was paused, and you’ve heard us talk about that many times."

"We continue to have constructive conversations with the Israelis for the release of that particular shipment and don’t have any updates on that. There are no other pauses or holds in place… Everything else is moving in due process."

But it's clear from the behavior and words of the crying Israeli man-baby, Zionist Murderer-in-Chief Netanyahu, that his concern lies with wrapping up the genocide as quickly as possible, noting in his earlier statement that increasing the flow of American weapons would "help him finish the war more rapidly."

In his typically over-aggrandizing style, like a 13-year-old girl in a middle school Drama class, the man-baby said “During World War II, [UK leader Winston] Churchill (another historical psychopath) told the United States, ‘Give us the tools, we’ll do the job,'" going to add, "and I say, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.”

According to unsourced reporting in the Hebrew media earlier on Thursday, the Top war-mongerer Antony Blinken promised the man-baby Netanyahu that he would remove any and all restrictions on US weapons transfers to the Zionist entity in the coming days. Information that was likely leaked by the man-baby or his administration themselves.

Despite the crocodile tears, it's become clear Genocide Joe and his administration are not serious about preventing the use of American weapons to kill tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of women and children, and will continue funding and arming the destruction of innocents despite the ever escalating concerns from International institutions like the ICJ that were built by the United States itself, along with its closest allies.

In just the latest example of the Genocide Joe administration's ever escalating foreign policy, The Times of Israel, citing the Washington Post, says the Biden administration pressured two lawmakers with a hint of a conscience, Rep. Gregory Meeks and Sen. Ben Cardin, who were holding up a single delivery of 50 F15 fighter jets for several months, into accepting the arms transfer.

Times of Israel:

"Rep. Gregory Meeks and Sen. Ben Cardin have signed off on the deal under heavy pressure from the Biden administration after the two lawmakers had for months held up the sale, the [Washington] Post reported."

The pressuring of lawmakers, the odd relationships leading to bizarre comments from their Israeli counterparts, and the holding up of a single symbolic arms delivery all come together to expose the Biden administration's greatest contradiction: its dedication to Neoconservative foreign policy and US Imperialist domination, while at the same time offering up the occasional virtue-signaling public comments to its base of more peace-prefering voters who, at the very least, don't want to watch a live-streamed genocide occur right before their eyes, funded by their tax dollars.

These contradictions continue to play themselves out before the eyes of the entire world as crying babies and manipulative political figures continue to take advantage of this contradiction, seeing it for the weakness it is and using it, and other weaknesses, to manipulate the Genocide Joe administration into endlessly backing the maniacal and psychopathic Israeli occupation as it forever escalates with its adversaries, hoping the drag the United States into another two decades of war in West Asia.

#source1

#source2

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[racefortheironthrone]

Did the Ottoman Empire ever express any interest in the New World?

Not particularly, for two main reasons:

Accessing the New World would involve very disadvantageous naval wars with the Spanish Empire, who would use their incredible defensive position at the Straits of Gibraltar to interdict Ottoman vessels in the name of God and Glory.

They didn't really need the New World. The main reason why the Portuguese and Spanish had begun their overseas expansion was to bypass the Ottomans and their middle-men position athwart the Silk Road and between the Europeans and access to the Indes. Through investing in their Indian Ocean fleet and working out trade deals with the Mughal Empire, the Ottomans had direct access to the largest and richest textile markets and the Spice Islands of Indonesia.

Why go to the effort and expense of an Atlantic voyage when they had all the riches of the world practically on their doorstep?

[canmom]

re the shit happening in palestine

nobody knows what will happen i guess, but like. what's most likely? my doomscrolling brain can produce possibilities from 'genocide to rival the worst of the 20th century' through 'syria-style proxy war' all the way up to 'first act of wwiii', and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop of the start of the ground invasion that would presumably make the sickening carnage of the last couple weeks look like nothing. meanwhile the countries around Israel are flinging a handful of rockets at US and Israeli military bases.

so like Israel's got to know that if it sends its whole army into Gaza, then Hezbollah etc. will attack and things will get much worse for them, so at some point they have to back down right? they're already having to play desperate PR damage control after they blew up that hospital, and even the U.S. is starting to say out of the corner of its mouth 'hey that's a bit much there buddy, go easy on the civilian slaughter'. on the other hand Israel seems to be pushing even fashier to enforce a pro-war sentiment internally - locking up any Arab citizen who says something anti-war, banning news orgs like Al Jazeera who don't toe the line, etc. like is it just going to fall back to the status quo plus several thousand bodies, or are we too far from that equilibrium at this point?

and as for Hamas and its allies - obviously they would have known that if they carried out a massive, bloody attack on Israel, the Israelis would go completely berserk and launch an even larger reprisal on the population of Gaza. ergo, they had to have believed that whatever they would achieve through such an attack might be 'worth that price', and have some sense of how things might go next - and they're still fighting, shooting rockets etc., but what's their current objective, just to survive as an organisation until other countries get pulled in against Israel?

really what i want to have some reason to believe is that there might be any remotely plausible way this can still work out to a 'better' state of affairs (no ethnic cleansing, no megadeaths - but also no more ghettoes, and somehow, end-of-apartheid-style negotiations to abolish the current Israeli state so that Palestinians can return home with equal legal rights etc.).

i see people talking like here is how the Palestinians will still win, that this is the first act in the overthrowing of Israel, even defining various neighbouring Islamic states as 'the resistance', because you need a team to cheer for I guess, enemy-of-my-enemy logic. but what seems more likely to come from that kind of escalation would just be a massive war which, if recent wars are anything to go by, will kill a lot of people and push every state/group involved to greater levels of internal repression, but eventually peter out without any sort of clear outcome. so... is Israel somehow much more fragile than it used to be? is there reason to think the US would cut it off?

anyway. for some historical comparisons - the Haitian Revolution took a little over 12 years (1791-1804) between the initial slave revolt and establishing an independent country (which promptly got squashed with debt and trade sanctions by the bitter European powers). in South Africa, the ANC turned to insurgency in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, and about 31 years later negotiations began for the end of apartheid (during the collapse of the USSR, which shifted the priorities of the US etc. who had been backing the apartheid gov). the Algerian War of Independence lasted about seven years (1954-1962). if this anti-colonial war is going to follow a similar trajectory... well, it depends when you start counting I guess, but probably it would take a decade or more to approach any sort of 'resolution' you could name.

the status quo obviously couldn't last indefinitely, you can't just keep a population in a massive prison and gradually bleed them out and not expect them to fight back, but in terms of ways this could fall down, there are some obviously very bad outcomes (nakba 2, surviving palestinians in Gaza exiled to e.g. egypt) that could establish a new equilibrium (apartheid state annexes the whole region after sufficiently depopulating it to establish a majority). that's not implausible, it's basically what happened in the U.S.A., Canada and Australia - the settler population now outnumbers the indigenous ones by orders of magnitude, and maintains a complicated legal regime to control the surviving population (reservations etc.). that's presumbly the outcome the present state of Israel 'wants' to achieve, gradually enough that it doesn't look too bad on TV. however, it's not there yet - in the combined territory of Israel and Palestine, there's presently roughly equal numbers of people defined by the census to be Jewish vs Palestinian.

conversely... the state of Israel's constantly broadcast fears about a combined 'one state solution' resulting in the Jewish population being treated the way the Israeli state currently treats the Palestinians (ethnic cleansing, massacres etc.), and the great-replacement birthrate bullshit, are surely completely overblown (notably the much smaller white population in South Africa was not banished at the end of apartheid), but what happens rather depends exactly how the state of Israel might collapse and who would hold power afterwards. and... in South Africa, the apartheid government in the last few apartheid years started to realise it had lost the game, and was making some paltry concessions - which the Israeli gov. is not doing at all, seeming to prefer to rush headlong into an 'us or them' war of annihilation, confident the U.S. will let it do whatever reckless shit it wants?

all in all it's a horrifying mess and I find it hard to feel any sort of hope that it won't just get worse in one of a dozen different ways. would love to be convinced otherwise. i always assume things will go in the bleakest way possible, which is not a very reliable mindset.

[kokorikopi]

and are these "video essays that just recap the series" in the room with us right now?

[jtoddring]

Greenwash, Lithium & Eco-Fascism

Proved: Greenwash Is Ecoterrorism, Eco-Fascism – and High-Tech, Neo-Feudal “Green” Imperialism Indigenous cultures in the “lithium triangle” of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia are being robbed, subjugated, poisoned and plundered, to make Teslas and cell phones. Corporate-state violence is the continuing norm, in response. Welcome to “Green” Imperialism. Cell phones, tablets, laptops and electric…

[kneedeepincynade]

My first article on multipolar reports is finally out! Go give it some love please

[yugotrash]

her releasing this between nakba day and jerusalem day.....what is she trying to tell us about the state of middle eastern politics in this crucial moment.....

[tinapaysmp]

The life series is starting again and I am very hype about it, but I've been making a bunch of Empire s1 headcanons and notes for the past week.

[subjects-of-the-king]

The Concept of Government Legitimacy in Greek Antiquity and the Modern World

An original essay of Lucas Del Rio

Note: This piece of mine references both the modern and ancient worlds. Dates in antiquity will always have BC attached. If there is no BC attached, then the date can be presumed to be AD. All references to events in the modern world are solely for the purpose of historical analysis and are not intended to support any political agenda.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a series of international conflicts, both with and without bloodshed, have arisen over the issue of the right of governments to rule their people. After the Second World War, a push occurred against colonialism, which at least in theory was because states were increasingly expected to have a right to constitutional sovereignty. Similar to Latin America in the nineteenth century, local peoples in Africa and Asia began to grow more nationalistic and demanded the right to have governments that answered to their own subjects rather than being the subjects themselves of imperial powers. This dream would be shattered, however, by the conflicting interests of the United States and the Soviet Union, who both had their own ideas of what a legitimate government meant. Now government legitimacy was no longer derived primarily from popular sovereignty, but rather from the two opposing systems of government and economic structure demanded by the rival superpowers. Consent from the people, as well as the right of a nation to rule itself, grew irrelevant as the former colonies became battlegrounds of political ideology through proxy war and coup d’etat regardless of what their citizens actually wanted. Even with the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than thirty years ago, the major powers of the world have far from ceased operating in this manner. Some countries, such as Somaliland in northern Somalia, have fully functioning governments without any international recognition of sovereignty. Others, such as the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, both claim the title of legitimacy over the other and both enjoy the recognition of certain other governments. Further still, some nations may try to undermine the status of another internationally, such as how the United States uses sanctions on Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.

One might assume that this recent history is only characteristic of the timeframe in which it occurred. With nationalism and the notion of universal human rights both being relatively new concepts, older history was indeed frequently dominated by empires, absolutism, and slavery. The idea that there was historically no consideration of government legitimacy could not be further from the truth, however. This topic has the potential to be studied in a myriad of times and places, but consider ancient Greece. Countless city-states were strewn across the country prior to the eventual finalization of the Roman conquest after the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC, and there was a lengthy political history in each of them before this annexation. Cities had different systems of governance, conquering cities installed puppet regimes in one another, and most importantly, there were standards for political legitimacy. In order to study the beginnings of the Greek political systems that would come to dominate her cities in the Classical (490 - 323 BC) and Hellenistic (323 - 30 BC) eras, the focus of research shall be on Athens in the Archaic Era (750 - 490 BC) and earlier.

The earliest surviving Hellenic writings that tell their history in an objective manner are the “Histories” of Herodotus. After spending as long as multiple decades traveling and writing about what was the known world to the Greeks in the fifth century BC, his finished text is arguably the best extant source on Archaic Greece, although little of it extends further back than the late seventh century BC. A crucial source for events before this is the “Chronicle” of Eusebius, a fourth century Christian scholar under Emperor Justinian the Great of the Byzantine Empire. In addition to more accepted facts, some of the contents of his “Chronicle” are clearly derived from legend, although folk tales can often help to decipher the history of a people. For this reason, the “Library” of Apollodorus the Grammarian, an Athenian scholar from the second century BC, is also useful. While the work had the explicit purpose of being a handbook to the ancient Greek beliefs about their deities, demigods, and other mythical figures, there is a great deal of purported information on the rulers of cities in the so-called heroic era, which when used with caution can allow it to serve as a sort of guide to Greece before it was chronicled by Herodotus and his successors. These three texts will therefore act as the main sources on the origins of Greek political structures.

The three better studied eras of ancient Greek history are preceded by the Aegean Bronze Age, a time period stretching from the first cities being founded on the archipelagos that surround the Greek mainland to the disappearance of the Mycenaean civilization, and the Greek Dark Ages, which last until official dates for Greek history are objectively established by the Olympic Games. As a side note, while historians generally simplify the dating by calling 750 BC the dawn of the Archaic Era, the first Olympiad was in 776 BC. In the Aegean Bronze Age, truly large cities emerged first on the island of Crete before being followed by those of the Mycenaeans on the mainland. Many historians have postulated that some later Greek legends were distant recollections of events in the Mycenaean era. This theory, one which deserves much greater study than it has received, is for the most part only applied to the Trojan War, although it has the potential to be used as a starting point for the study of the dawn of Greek politics. Greek legend, like those of many other cultures, had a flood myth in which Zeus attempted to wipe out the human race over anger about child sacrifice. Since the story of the Minotaur also involves child sacrifice of a sort, it seems very likely that the Greeks at one time may have had such a ritual practice. After all, the Greek hero Theseus, son of King Aegeus, overcame great odds against King Minos of Crete, interestingly the location where civilization had arisen first, when he slew his monster that had been living on the flesh of Athenian boys and girls.

If the Greeks truly did practice child sacrifice early on, then both of these stories appear to be a moral condemnation of it. In the case of the flood, it was Lycaon, King of Arcadia in the Peloponnese according to the Latin poet Ovid, who had sacrificed a boy to Zeus. Disgusted, the King of the gods of the Greeks was said to have executed the offending monarch with lightning before receiving the assistance of Poseidon and Triton to flood the world with the heaviest rains ever seen. No one would have a more legitimate claim to kingship than the one who ruled from Olympus, and he had the right to depose a much lesser leader for an obsolete, barbaric practice. To fulfill his goal, he requested help from other members of his family with their own realms. This would be followed by the suffering of many others. While Zeus and probably also Lycaon belong solely to myth, the story could represent child sacrifice surviving as a practice in the peripheral regions of Greece until the leaders of these areas were wiped out by their stronger foes. There is also the possibility that the child sacrifice is allegorical for a different practice of one or more kings, but it still demonstrates the mindset of the Greeks at the time. Given that King Minos also sacrificed children, however, it may be more than a mere allegory. 

Contemporary international relations also involve countries that are more powerful and more favorably viewed looking at weak and isolated countries as both primitive and backwards, then using this mindset to justify military or other action. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, where the United States views Islamic countries, albeit selectively, as foes who refuse to adapt to the modern world. An especially long-running example is Iran, where the Islamic Revolution of 1979 left the country as an adversary of the United States. Iran is condemned by the United States for its theocratic system of governance, a system that the United States sees as illegitimate. More recently, they have accused the Iranians of developing nuclear weapons, which the United States views with suspicion. Of course, most people in the world would agree that theocracy is obsolete in the twenty-first century and that continued nuclear proliferation, regardless of the country obtaining the weapons, is dangerous for people everywhere, just as they would be horrified by child sacrifice. At the same time, many would disagree with the practice of heavy economic sanctions and repeated military threats, which they might view as illegitimate means of diplomacy in the twenty-first century.

The story of Theseus and the Minotaur, as previously asserted, is also essentially about child sacrifice. Unlike King Lycaon, however, it is King Minos who is the powerful ruler subjecting Athens to his will, demanding human sacrificial tribute in a manner similar to the Aztecs. Theseus in this case is playing the role of revolutionary against an old custom. As this tale involves Crete as the location of the greatest power, it is probably that it represents earlier events, when child sacrifice was the norm and still practiced by the most important kings. Here Minos, therefore, is the illegitimate ruler because of his oppressive actions which unjustly interfere in the affairs of another sovereign state. In a twist, Theseus was said by the Athenians to have initiated upon his return the most important political development in Greek history, and arguably, if there is any truth to it, the world. Plutarch, in his work “Parallel Lives” about the greatest of the Greeks and Romans, writes “he promised government without a king” where “he should only be commander in war and guardian of the laws, while in all else everyone should be on an equal footing.” This, according to Plutarch, was “a democracy.”

There is one last notable development to this story, however, and it is that at least some of the Greeks telling it did not view this decision by Theseus favorably, including Plutarch. “He saw that a large part of the people were corrupted” writes Plutarch, who also adds that they “wished to be cajoled into service instead of doing silently what they were told to do.” For many Greeks, the democracy that had been won by the Athenian hero after he freed the city from Cretan subjugation was not the most legitimate system of government, as much of the international community would agree today, but rather the least. Even in the twenty-first century, this story has great relevance. Some highly autocratic leaders, especially in Africa, still try to discredit the concept of democracy by pointing to the failures of democracies that are otherwise similar to their own states by pointing out the failure of these governments to bring down corruption, crime, disorder, poverty, and reliance on foreign powers. The Latin American strongmen, juntas, and one-party states in countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Mexico used similar arguments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some would argue that the region has grown significantly more authoritarian in the last decade or so. Furthermore, like Theseus, leaders in modernity who attempt to initiate change by fighting imperial powers and establishing radical new systems of government are rarely successful. Communism is the most well-known example, although a similar issue can be seen in the African anticolonial revolutionaries of the 1960s, where newly democracy almost immediately collapsed in nearly every newly independent state and is yet to return to many. Unfortunately, both the terms “communist state” and “African state” have become heavily associated with tyranny, whether the generalization is fair or not.

Plutarch may provide a lengthy biography of Theseus, although Apollodorus discusses several other legendary Athenian kings, and Eusebius gives a simple yet thorough chronology. Apollodorus maintains that the different gods built cities that would be their respective site of worship, and the one built by Athena was Athens. Ogygus, according to Eusebius, was their first king, then “the Greeks relate that their great ancient flood happened in his reign” and “Attica remained without a king for 190 years.” There is no evidence, of course, that such a flood genuinely occurred, although the unknown event that mysteriously led to the crumbling of the Mycenaean civilization at the dawn of the Greek Dark Ages likely left governance in some parts of Greece in a state of limbo. It is therefore not unthinkable that central control in Athens could have broken down for almost two centuries, possibly with a multitude of warring factions all claiming the title of legitimate ruler while decrying the others as tyrants. “Tyrant” was a frequently used word in ancient Greece for a usurper of the government of a polis, especially one previously controlled by a “rightful” royal family and particularly in the Archaic Era. Its roots originate with the Lydian people of Asia Minor, whom Herodotus says were ruled by a dynasty descended from the Greek hero Heracles, better known today by his Latinized name Hercules, until they were overthrown by Gyges of the Mermnad dynasty. Using lengths of reign and other chronological dates provided by the celebrated Ionian historian, modern scholars have calculated the date of this seizure of power to have been 716 BC, or early in the Archaic Era of the neighboring land of the Greeks.

When the legitimacy of a regime is questioned in the modern world, the result can be the collapse of the central government. Oftentimes a military government ends up replacing a civilian one, or worse yet, central authority completely collapses into an ungovernable warlord state. Two Arab countries in North Africa are recent examples of the two situations. In 2011, the longtime dictators Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, in power since 1981, and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya, in power since 1969, were both expelled from power after mass demonstrations erupted into widespread street violence. Both leaders suddenly received condemnation from the international community, with Mubarak choosing to step down while Qaddafi was killed after risking a civil war that he lost. Egypt was celebrated for holding her first free and fair elections, but there was once again anger from both world leaders and the local population with the newly elected Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A coup d’etat followed in 2013 with a minimum of international condemnation, Morsi would die under suspicious circumstances in 2019, and the country is now led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the military officer who deposed him. A far more dire situation has occurred in Libya, which quickly descended into a civil war with various opposing factions backed by several different foreign countries, including some of her African neighbors as well as the great powers of the world.

Tyranny was exceptionally common in the Greek Archaic Era before a transition towards more democracies and aristocracies as the Classical Era dawned. Herodotus writes heavily about the different tyrants, as his successor Thucydides does to a lesser extent. The author of the “History of the Peloponnesian War,” which chronicled the catastrophic violence between Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century BC, Thucydides is generally considered to have been the greatest historian of the Classical Era after Herodotus. Some modern scholars even prefer Thucydides as a writer because they feel his approach is less biased and that he more carefully vetted his sources. He writes that “the old form of government was hereditary monarchy with established rights and limitations” until “tyrannies were established in nearly all the cities.” Clearly Thucydides considers monarchy to be a more legitimate form of government. Today, military seizures of power are at the very least internationally condemned and often met with economic sanctions such as embargoes and asset freezes, showing that unconstitutional rule by juntas is now no longer seen as legitimate as it was during the Cold War and earlier. On the other hand, while the official international consensus is supposed to be that absolute monarchy is obsolete, powerful countries such as the United States continue to work closely with hereditary regimes such as Saudi Arabia. One reason given for the illegitimacy of military government is the squandering of economic resources, a sentiment shared by Thucydides when he says “for a long long the state of affairs everywhere in Hellas was such that nothing very remarkable could be done” and “cities were lacking in enterprise.”

According to Eusebius, following the reestablishment of monarchy in Athens by King Cecrops, who is also mentioned in the myths told by Apollodorus, the city was ruled by a series of seventeen kings. These kings, he says, belonged to the Erechtheid dynasty, who reigned for 450 years. As Athens transitioned from monarchy, the heads of government were the archons. The reason for this abandonment of monarchy by the Athenians is unclear, but there must have been forces in the city causing a different political system to be considered a more legitimate form of rule. Initially, the archons held power for life, and then his dates show that after 763 BC they began to be appointed for ten year terms. After 684 BC, these terms changed to one year. Just like in Athens, countries in the modern world grapple with the legitimacy of individual leaders based on the duration in which they are permitted to remain in power. Especially in the more peripheral states of the world, changes are frequently made to national constitutions regarding term limits and the length of individual terms. Herodotus mentions a series of tyrannies and attempted tyrannies in Athens that occurred prior to the democratic reforms that historians believe occurred in 508 BC. 

A pivotal moment occurred in Greece, which foreshadowed a major aspect of modern geopolitics, as the Archaic Era was coming to a close. This was the first and second Persian invasion of Greece, which caused something to occur in the world that had never happened before. In these wars, the greatest imperial power of the world chose to use its massive army against a people who, more than had happened up until this point in history, were starting to develop a national identity. The Greeks did not wish to be subjects of the Persians. To the Greeks, despite their many scattered governments, only Greek rule over Greece was legitimate, and they therefore showed unity and strength to defend their sovereignty. During the eighteenth century, such a notion of nationalism spread across the globe. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became commonplace for nationalist partisans to resist instances of foreign occupation. Since the Second World War, direct occupation of a different nation-state has grown increasingly difficult, as evidenced by the local responses in Afghanistan in 1979, Iraq in 2003, and Ukraine in 2022. Like the Greeks of the fifth century BC, the people of the modern world are increasingly valuing both democracy and their own sovereignty, and like the Classical Greeks, they have the potential for some of the greatest deeds in human history.

[nicolae]

Principles of intelligence analysis for agencies, business and (geo)politics

Principles of intelligence analysis for agencies, business and (geo)politics

Sfetcu, Nicolae (2022), Principles of intelligence analysis for agencies, business and (geo)politics, DOI: , in Telework:   Abstract Intelligence, in addition to scientific knowledge, involves the inclusion of human, socio-economic and political factors in the equation, and obtaining it through analysis, information and predictions by combining all the factors involved. Intelligence analysis…

[momxijinping]

So long as Iran stays out of it, Israel seems to think it can not only hack it alone, limiting the damage to its own civilian heartland by intercepting or preemptively destroying most of Hezbollah’s longer-range missiles. For now, dragging the US into the war becomes less of a priority; but at any rate, involvement is a spectrum, not a binary. Washington needs to balance its wariness of a regional war with enough deterrence to protect its own regional proxy - one that it knows it can’t rebuild or replace once lost. At some point, this deterrence will need to be demonstrated in action, and as Joe Biden’s red lines to Israel have proven to be infinitely elastic, Israel can be fairly confident that little by little, America can become involved enough in the war to take on anyone Netanyahu picks a fight with. All this only makes sense if you attach very little value to the human beings in front of you - whether Lebanese, Palestinian or Israeli - and fix your gaze firmly above these real lives onto some cold, theoretical, tactical horizon. And it all, quite simply, may well be a miscalculation. Hezbollah might have capabilities Israel hasn’t accounted for; Iran’s patience might snap overnight rather than wane slowly; a stray rocket might hit an ammonia plant and goodbye, Haifa. A lot can happen. But for now, Israel is betting the house that it will not.

...

Back when he was a sharp young war reporter in Beirut in the early 1980’s, Thomas Friedman jotted down the most succinct distillation of Israeli geopolitical psyche ever put on paper. It goes like this: “If I’m strong, why should I negotiate? If I’m weak, how can I negotiate?” This has been often cited as an explanation for Israel’s reluctance to embark on negotiations and peace processes. But it can also help explain Israel’s preference for war. Elaborating on Friedman’s aphorism might read like this: “Any negotiation from other than a dominant position projects weakness. Therefore, whatever result I find acceptable is better achieved by force; even an apparent gain, if made in negotiations, will reveal that I can be pressured, and invite more aggression. Violence, conversely, is a win-win; either I’ll get what I could’ve gotten through negotiations, but at such a cost to the enemy they will swear off trying any leverage on me for a good long while; or I’ll get that, and then some.” If you think pyrrhic victories are bad, this approach is saying, pyrrhic compromises are worse. Hubris insulates Israel somewhat from considering outright defeat an option, and at any rate defeat and compromise are seen as one and the same: for us, it’s either hegemony or Treblinka. Any middle ground slopes towards the ash pit. From its leadership’s perspective, Israel isn’t rejecting a comprehensive peace ceasefire in favour of a two-front war that risks become regional. It’s rejecting any relationship between Hamas’s interest and Hezbollah, by taking on the latter only after militarily weakening the former, while gambling on Iran staying out of this round, too. The end result might be very close to what Israel could’ve gotten without killing tens of thousands of people and losing thousands of its own soldiers and citizens; but to Israel, the how it gets it matters as much, if not more, than what it gets. And there is a crucial personal consideration too: by all indicators, Netanayahu really does want to continue some level of war indefinitely, at least until Israel’s opposition has been compromised enough to ensure his victory in the next election, and the judiciary system has been eviscerated enough to ensure his corruption trials collapse.

...

But at the end of the day, the same old rule applies: Israel simply wants as much as it can get. The only way for anyone to make it stop continually reaching for more is to inflict some pretty hefty stick, not dangle nice juicy carrots down negotiation lane. Under a more decisive president and a less lacklustre foreign policy team than the Blinken-Sullivan-McGurk leadership, the stick would come from Washington. As things stand, it looks like Washington will hum and haw until things escalate so far that the stick will eventually come from Tehran - at a far higher cost to everyone, Washington included.

23 Sept 2024

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇦🇮🇱 It is noted that before the events of October 7th, 2023, the United States had spent the last year and a half giving Ukraine the vast majority of its reserve munitions, which have since been largely emptied.

However, since October, Israel has been obtaining America's personal war stockpiles to bomb and shell Gaza.

If the US wishes to continue arming both Israel and Ukraine, it will require a major increase in shell production, which US claims it cannot do until 2025.

One wonders how the US intends to continue arming both countries while ALSO instigating war with China over its island province of Taiwan?

How would such a war be fought? Where would the funding come from? Where would the shells come from? How quickly can the US really scale up production after four decades of deindustrialization?

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[futurefatum]

FUTURE WEEKLY ROUNDUP: Week of August 26th

Discover key predictions for 2024 and beyond, from economic shifts to spiritual awakenings, cross-referenced with historical trends. #futurefatum #weeklyroundup

As of September 1st, 2024 by FutureFatum.com This Weeks Predictions and Their Implications Over the week from August 26th to August 31st, a wide array of predictions from diverse sources, including astrologers, economic analysts, psychics, and even pop culture, converged on a few key themes about the future. This blog synthesizes these predictions into a cohesive narrative and cross-references…