The Occident is heading for an Accident: Some predictions

Jan Oberg

December 7, 2023 – two months into the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

Introduction – the boomerangs from supporting Israel’s genocide

I published the article below on TFF Substack on October 22, 2023. I had been waiting for someone to intervene and tell Israel to stop its immoral, illegal and barbaric – as well as intentional – genocide of the Palestinian people. But no Western power exerted any pressure; tragically, instead, most silently or openly, passively or actively supported Israel – no matter Israel’s policies and behaviour.

Hamas’ attack on October 7 on Israel can only be condemned. But what is not clear is what actually happened. How was it possible that the Israeli and US intelligence missed all the indicators of what must have taken months for Hamas to prepare? Is it true that Egyptian military authorities warned Israel and PM Netanyahu personally – but in vain? Did Israel know about it and let it happen to have a pretext?

Anyhow, these are the figures on November 24 (thus much higher today) – a criminal and disproportionate overkill reaction while Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147:

Time has passed, and I spent all of November in China – at some mental and political distance, so to speak. Never had I thought that any country in the world would be able to get away with what Israel – the Jewish nation-state – has systematically done without one single Western country withdrawing its support and condemning the ongoing, undeniable genocide.

In such a situation, silence means complicity. So does active cooperation – economically, politically and militarily.

If the US and/or other powerful Western governments had set down their foot and stated that Israel must be isolated in various ways until it stops the brutal, deliberate and systematically planned assault on innocent people, Israel would have to stop. Instead, it is being encouraged by the de facto Western supportive cooperation.

Or, the tail wags the dog.

Over two months, there have been no manifest calls for holding the Israeli government and other leaders accountable for what is the most significant, deliberate genocide in the West since 1945. In my view, the Israeli political and military leadership has placed itself outside the global human community and must be brought to justice.

This ongoing genocide is likely to have huge consequences in the long-term perspective. The rest of the world – the 85% outside the NATO/EU world – will draw their conclusions about the tremendous and mind-boggling hypocrisy and systematic double standards exhibited by the 15% West. That world is likely to feel an even stronger urge to turn its back on the West, which preaches human rights but ignores them completely and conspicuously to achieve its geo-strategic goals with the most perverse means available.

What happens in Gaza happens because the West has an interest in it. If it didn’t, it would have taken action to stop it.

It will be self-destructive, too, for the US/NATO/EU:

• Anti-semitism and anti-Zionism will spread. Particularly if the Jewish nation in Israel and worldwide does not urgently distance itself unequivocally from the crimes committed by the Jewish state.

• Terrorism will spiral upwards.

• Refugee problems and costs will multiply.

• Divisions in the EU and NATO will occur the longer, the more devastating and the more indefensible it gets.

• Tendentially losing the region, the US/NATO will end up getting involved militarily in the Middle East, most likely a larger war and the Arab world plus Iran will re-align and align with Russia and China in a new conflict formation throughout the Middle East. And whatever may have been left of Western values, moral authority and legitimacy will disappear.

• Citizens all over will take to the streets and protest the squandering of their resources on guns instead of butter.

• Right-wing-to-fascist forces will see the increasing light of their dawn. Holland today – Germany tomorrow?

These trends/predictions will manifest themselves after the West has made one strategic miscalculation after the other the last two decades:

1 • The US helter-skelter started the Global War on Terror, GWOT, in response to the September 11, 2001 events. It starts a global war – not on what causes terrorists to become terrorists but on terrorists as such, and for each killed human being, there are ten new ones ready to die for their cause. In consequence, millions of people have been killed and harmed and displaced – and the problem of terrorism has, as fully predicted, not been solved.

2 • NATO’s expansion instead of abolition at the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. In particular, the hubris of exploiting the one-polar world order option and the expansion of NATO into Ukraine – both predictable disasters and a destroyed Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded will be the result.

3 • The long Cold War build-up by the US/West against China – the systematic negative and self-destructive image of China that has nothing to do with the Chinese reality – but, again, is self-destructive.

4 • The US destruction of Nordstream – the largest infrastructure destruction ever that, together with the Western sanctions response and new Iron Curtain vis-a-vis the largest European state, Russia, is likely to have unspeakably destructive effects on Europe over time – politically, economically and in terms of ongoing rampant militarist investment – guns before butter

5 • And now the Gaza genocide endorsement – that destroys the remaining few elements of Western decency, legitimacy and authority.

These short-sighted catastrophic policies of the general West will have self-destructive and self-defeating consequences – and sooner rather than later. They are all of the West’s own kakistocratic making – no one threatens the existence of the West. When the US Empire falls, it will be completely of its own making.

Here is the original article:

In civilisational terms, war is a backward, primitive thing; it solves no conflicts and creates no security – only hate, which fuels more war.

It’s a system or structural evil – much more than a human evil.

Equally primitive and uncultured is, of course, this type of black-and-white, simplified narrative: there is only one evil party – the Palestinians and Hamas. The war has only one cause – Hamas’ attack – and we in the West need neither history nor conflict analysis to understand anything.

Further, we don’t need sym- and empathy with innocent suffering human beings on all sides – only with one side’s.

All that is needed is politically correct emotionalism and side-taking – no matter the fact that these two irrelevant tools are guaranteed to make everything worse and get more innocent people killed.

The EU’s top leader von der Leyen has the guts to declare that “Europe stands with Israel” – but which ‘Europe,’? And were you ever elected by ’Europe’ or by the EU citizens to speak on their behalf, Madam?

The indefatigable Irish for-peace European MP, Irish Clare Daly, made exactly that point much more eloquently than I just did on Oct 8 when she demanded that von der Leyen shut up because she doesn’t represent ‘Europe’ at all. Some 800 EU staff members in Brussels have written a letter protesting her statements and ignoring the two-state solution.

State Department official Josh Paul resigned over the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict. It’s brewing.

It has all become too easy to take stands. It’s a display of intellectual and moral laziness: Condemnation requires no knowledge or complex understanding, but it speaks to the minds of kakistocrats.

It’s Kitsch politics! It actively promotes the death of thousands upon thousands on all sides, and it is fundamentally immoral because other ways of engaging in the Middle East conflicts were eminently possible.

In Ukraine, EU/NATO countries side with the underdog that has been invaded. In this war, it sides with topdog Israel, the apartheid occupier with nukes who has created history’s largest prison with the full blessing of the declining West through decades.

From another perspective, it is a huge blow to Israel and the US – a complete ‘intelligence’ failure. If that is what it was. Most likely, it wasn’t. More and more info and statements from local experts underpin the dreadful hypothesis that Israel was aware of Hamas’ attack and let it happen. Allegedly, a fox would not be able to run through the border installations; Hamas did for hours.

When Israel’s occupation-to-extermination policy has run its course – “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” and no mercy plus total ethnic cleansing and flattening of dwellings – the US/NATO/EU governments will have drowned with it in a blood-drenched unsolvable moral dilemma of their own creation.

They won’t see it, never foresaw it. They did not care about the consequences of their ”response” to Hamas’ attack – despicable as it was, yes, but not unprovoked, for sure.

So to cover up yet another Western politico-moral disaster, Western knee-jerk reaction is, as usual ’more weapons,’ no ceasefire, no mediation and no negotiations. Militarist thinking excludes diplomacy. We never make mistakes!

Since the decision-makers in Western capitals have lost on both economic, political, cultural, diplomatic and moral power dimensions, there is only one left – as in all falling empires in history: Militarism. Mass killing. Ethnic cleansing. Kill the people instead of the problem that stands unsolved between the parties and caused the violence in the first place.

What we are going to see in weeks and months to come in the Middle East will make the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and the war in Ukraine pale. Western foreign policy can no longer be understood by rational analysis, political science or international relations thinking.

We need concepts and theories from psychology, psychiatry and religion to understand the blame games, emotionalism, psycho-political projection, presumed innocence, denial, compulsive repetition, paranoia, scapegoating, revenge, and aggression that get full blast in various blends in the policies of the US/NATO/EU countries.

Therefore, words like conflict analysis, conflict-resolution, mediation, peacekeeping, negotiations and reconciliation – not to mention peace – no longer belong to the vocabulary of Western foreign ministries – and neither in state-financed research and the mainstream media.

The Occident is heading for an Accident. Its reservoirs of legitimacy, knowledge and ethics are even more depleted than its arsenals of weapons.

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