War, lies, and amapiano

IOL News

a day ago

President Bill Clinton must have been a lucky man. In his first term of office, he met with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, following the latter's election as his country's head of government.
Image: Bebeto Matthews/File/AP
IT could have been Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian or Phillip Gibbs, the journalist who covered the First World War, who probably coined the all-time enduring aphorism. During war, the first casualty is the truth.
Whoever it was is purely academic. It is the prophetic accuracy of the quote attributed to both which is the hallmark of the US empire.
The energy that fuels the current global order is wholly predicated on layers and layers of quasi-truths, catechismic recitations and just pure unadulterated lies. After all, with so much military power, lies rank least in the hierarchy of the empire's problems.
These opaque reams of deception have compacted for so long, they have ossified into concrete like plinths that support the unipolar facade.
Yarn upon yarn, they have been spun at such dizzying frequencies and complexity of detail that time has hardened their surface. And in the absence of contradicting counter narratives, especially with the dominance of the legacy media, so many generations of men and women post the two world wars have come to depend on the refined glib of their manufactured consent and the rhetoric of the captured academic institutions that shape societal consciousness.
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And for lack of alternatives, it has become intractably difficult to view the world from any other vantage. The are two alternating sides, the one far less likely than its mendacious counterpart. The more absurd and aggressive the lie is, the greater the opportunity for its acceptability. Any timid yet truthful variety cannot conceivably compete.
Mark Twain was right. A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets the chance to put its pants on. There are little lies, ostensibly told without fear of consequence. And there are big lies, reserved no doubt, to start wars or casually justify them.
However, there are many other frequent deceptive quips randomly churned out by the system's inbred algorithms designed to embellish the insidiousness of the US hegemony.
President Bill Clinton must have been a lucky man. In his first term of office, he met with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, following the latter's election as his country's head of government. In that much-reported encounter, Clinton is said to have famously retorted, 'who the hell is the superpower here?', a rebuke which must have incensed his visitor. So soon thereafter, he literally survived two Epstein-esque operations.
Every so often, when Monica Lewinsky returned from Tel Aviv, she would meet her 'friend', a deep state Pentagon operative named Linda Tripp. After a dress with a sputtering of what was vaunted as Presidential spermatozoids got paraded before the media, and many tape recordings between Monica and Linda nestled in the hands of Bibi Netanyahu, President Clinton narrowly survived an impeachment attempt.
Whether or not the beret-wearing intern was consciously party to an intel operation or was a mole herself is both unclear and possibly irrelevant. Nor can it be said with prescience that it was an operation at all, notwithstanding the causality and sequentiality of events.
For the damsel in distress, however, she casually sauntered out of the scene and landed herself a job in Tel-a-Viv. Epstein 1.0. Check!
With the mission unaccomplished, the real Epstein showed up on a 2.0 version on steroids, replete with private jets, verdant islands and many more exotic offerings besides. The problem is, this Epstein fellow is said to have relinquished his task without honours and exited the stage in a huff. And Patel, not of the Glengarry leads, is sternly corroborated by Bongino, his deputy at the FBI, that Jeffrey, the scion of the Epsteins, egressed unassisted.
The American blend of hegemony has a distinguishably strong flavour, as deceitful as it is violent. When Great Britain's empire was underway, as equally deceitful as it was similarly violent, it had other competing powers in other hemispheres. France and Spain come to mind.
For its coverage and influence, the British imperialist footprint lent depth to the definition of hegemony, an attribution which could not be enjoyed by Portugal, Spain or France, for that matter. Their collective reach on other hemispheres marked the tolerance and strategic restraint of British dominance in trade and warfare.
The US hegemony has other plans, however. Unlike the British experiment, it has no margin of tolerance for competition at all. If the Monroe doctrine defined the need for an American near abroad and spheres of influence, Wolfowitz for his part, redefined the concept in his own image, and turned the entire globe into an American near abroad.
For that redefinition to hold, the United States of America, the only country called 'America' among 35 countries dotting the two eponymously named hemispheres, needs acres and acres of lies to sustain it.
Donald J Trump has a name for it, whose prosaic brilliance betrays the hubris of the empire's adventurism. 'Obliterated!'
The essence of the furore that ensues from 'obliterated', or its meaning, is playing out in the United States with ferocity. And it has united all the warring parties instead of dividing them. With the exception of a few, it confirms the US hatred for Iran and the US administration's commitment to its military project called Israel. Joe Biden, even in his much publicised fog of senility, was convinced that if there was no Israel, America would create one.
On the one side of the obliteration divide are Trump's acolytes, who claim that Iran's nuclear sites and capabilities are gone forever. And perhaps that would eschew Trump from going back to Iran for other targeted strikes. And on the same side, too, are the more rational intellectual voices which can appreciate the dilemma of the tyranny of deception. For them, the obliteration lie must go on so that no war must be contemplated against the people of Iran.
The other side of that divide is inhabited by neocons and war mongers. They don't believe the three nuclear sites were obliterated, nor that the resolve of the mullahs was definitively attenuated. Dead scientists or not, they are convinced that Iran is getting ready to restart the fissile centrifuges in a quick turnaround.
After all, they point out with conviction that the Highly Enriched Uranium is nowhere to be found. Therefore, the US must return to Iran and finish the job. A lie that holds an entire nation together is both fragile and dangerous. It renders the entire adhesive fabric of that society fragile and their politicians dangerous. But as they say, in America, whoever you vote for, you get John McCain!
Yet the opportunity to fan the flames can never be missed. Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the IAEA has a brash, aggressive and fiercely pro-Zionist President, Javier Milei. Grossi, the Argentinian diplomat, found himself in a maelstrom of accusations that he has been secretly providing intelligence on the Iranian nuclear sites, technical progression, and other sensitive geolocation information to Israeli intelligence. After the obliteration declaration by Trump, the Iranians have banned the IAEA from monitoring their sites.