How do you create enough chaos to get away with murder?
Murder is used metaphorically, but may also be the reality when we look at the chaos which is seen in politics and geo-politics today, but it has enough precedents to scare the bejesus out of anyone paying attention.
In 2018, former advisor to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, talked about how the White House would “flood the zone with shit” to overwhelm the media. The objective to make it nearly impossible to make sense of what was going on. And today we see that happening again, but seemingly more of a tsunami than a mere flood. Tariffs, executive orders, bullying in the Oval Office, obfuscation after obfuscation, refusal to address questions being asked, but deflecting to denigration of the person asking the question. The flow of diatribe, of incoherence is an endless stream, so much so that no one seems to really get to grasp what is going on.
Not even Trump’s favourite news source, Fox News, seems to understand what is happening.
It is chaos.
Flooding the zone with shit really covers a multitude of manipulative campaigns to achieve outcomes deemed important by despotic leaders, no matter what price is paid by others.
Where is this leading us, where is this chaos heading? Is it really going to “Make America Great Again” or is it undermining the very premise of what made America ‘great’ in the first place? Has America ever been real ‘great’ for all but the wealthy few?
America has been there before though, the age of the “Robber Barons” comes to mind, where a number of industrialists and financiers sought to control the growing US economy, amassing fortunes through unethical and ruthless business practices, using their positions of industrial and economic power to influence governments for their own benefit, rather than that of the population at large.
In that respect, when we see those closest to Trump, and so well displayed at the time of his inauguration, those closest to him included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other billionaires.
The movers and shakers at the turn of the previous century included John D. Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest individuals at that time dominating the oil industry through Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie who pioneered expansion of the steel industry to amass a vast fortune, Cornelius Vanderbilt, railroad and shipping, and J.P. Morgan, financier who helped shape the American financial system, among others.
Each was ruthless in growing their fortunes and ensuring that the maximum profits were raised through unethical business practices such as price fixing, stock market manipulation and aggressive tactics to eliminate rival businesses while paying low wages and forcing long hours with dangerous unsafe working conditions, at the same time used their wealth to influence politics and gain favourable laws through the congress and state systems.
In the White House today, we see the influence of the Tech Bros, dare I call them today’s Robber Barons?
Canada has given up the quest to tax the internet moguls, yielding to Trump’s demand that should happen in order to negotiate a more favourable tariff regime. Australia too is trying to have the Google, Meta and other tech companies pay taxes and pay for the news sources they use. But will face the same pre-conditions as Canada had.
Trump is not the first leader to “flood the zone with shit.”
The consolidation of political power and the building of a nation state is an enterprise fraught with dangers. How does a political leader secure the stability to create a safe nation from a political and possibly ethnic mix which is volatile?
History gives us several interesting, diverse examples from the last century.
After WWI Germany saw the fall of the House of Hohenzollern, the German hereditary royal family and replaced by the Weimar Republic, but at a time when economic pressures to pay for the costs of the war Germany had lost and the conflicting ideologies saw fifteen years of chaos. But in 1933, the rise of the Nazi party and the manipulation of the system to form a populist government saw peace come to Germany, like Phoenix rising from the ashes, as described by people who travelled in and out of Germany during that time.
What those people did not see was the repression of freedoms and the beginnings of what became the Holocaust. The deliberate, orchestrated campaign of dehumanising specific targeted populations.
Out of the chaos, we saw the rise of Hitler’s Germany, the rise of a hyper-nationalism which promoted the idea of a super-race, Aryan, a genetically pure Germanic people, and through that a willingness to eradicate Germany of races considered inferior, vermin, both Jew and Gypsy as well as any one else who did not fit the mould of perfection, homosexuals, disabled, those deemed to be mentally ill.
Racial superiority meant justifying taking lands where German speaking people lived, Lebensraum, room for Germans and German speakers to live; Austria, parts of Hungary and to rid Europe of the vermin Jews, the invasion of Poland.
That ended badly for Germany, losing another very costly war, but with help to reconstruct the economy and establishment of a controlled move to democracy at least in West Germany at the time, a new Germany was formed, a responsible ‘citizen’ in a reconstructed Europe.
China’s Cultural Revolution was another case of chaos, another case of “flooding the zone with shit.”
In 1958 Mao Zedong launched China’s second five year plan, The Great Leap Forward, which was intended to increase China’s Industrial and agricultural output, but with forced relocations of peasants to work on large scale infrastructure projects saw a decline in agricultural production leading to mass starvation as an unprepared population struggled with the ‘four olds’, old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. These were essentially blamed for failure of the great leap forward and so from 1962 Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution, to develop a new, communist China with new ideas, new culture, new customs and new habits. A new China and a new revolutionary culture based on Maoist ideology. Dissent was not possible.
Both The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution saw millions displaced, but the severity of The Cultural Revolution saw the cultural bedrock of Chinese traditions destroyed. The early and mid career art of Ai Weiwei focusses on much that was lost of Chinese tradition and culture with great installations reflecting on the loss of temples, of the farming traditions of the peasantry, and his reflections of the ‘re-education’ of his poet father, moving from the world of academia to raising his family in a cave, far from Beijing.
Millions lost their lives during both programmes, but when China opened to western investment after the 1972 visit by Richard Nixon, the transition to an industrialised China began in earnest.
The chaos of having the ‘zone flooded with shit’ during both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution laid the foundation for China being the fastest growing economy in the world today.
Other examples exist, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot in Kampuchea/Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, was a brutal attempt at rebuilding Cambodia, but the regime conducted a genocide, eliminating as many as 2 million people including many of the country’s professional and cultural class.
The rebuilding of Cambodia has been a painful process, so many skills were lost, its cultural heritage decimated to such an extent that the country is still impoverished, has still not recovered from the losses incurred, from being self sufficient, Cambodia is now dependent on foreign aid to feed and sustain its population.
In the historic cases of flooding the zone with shit, the zone has generally been within a country, but there is a current example which is flooding surrounding zones with shit as an effort to destabilise a region so that one nation can find peace.
When we look at the history of Israel/Palestine from the time of that region being a British Mandated Territory, there has been a destabilisation of the surrounding countries, the Arab countries which may have objected to the establishment of a colonial state of displaced Jews. The destabilisation started by not recognising the Palestinian people who had lived in the country of Palestine for thousands of years, denying their very existence, refusing to name them, refusing to at any time acknowledge their right to the land, even to negotiate what was intended from the beginning to be a two-state agreement, having the Jewish diaspora settle alongside the indigenous population.
The flood of shit hitting the zone includes the constant refrain of Israel’s right to exist, which at no time has been denied, but it should not be at the expense of the Palestinians.
The evacuation of 700,000 Palestinians and the destruction of their villages, homes, and agriculture starting in 1947, the Nakba, the ongoing repression of those who have remained, including those who live on The West Bank and East Jerusalem, the constant state of conflict and interference with the refugees from the Nakba, those living in Syria and Lebanon, the constant pre-emptive strikes on what may be potential enemies in the last 80 years has seen as many as six wars conducted against both the Palestinians who remain and neighbouring countries which may harbour them.
To flood the zone with shit, fears of attacks from Arab neighbours has been a constant refrain, the actions of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency has infiltrated neighbouring communities and other potential enemies, including Iran as demonstrated by the knowledge of where targeted individual lives and worked.
In the flood of shit filling that zone, support is garnered from other countries with an active pro-Israeli lobby working hard to ensure that the only message allowed is that supportive of Israel, branding dissent as terrorism, anti-semitism, so that sympathy is drawn away from the suffering of those being displaced.
The news that a cafe in Gaza, a meeting place for journalists and others, one of the few places where internet connections are in Gaza was bombed, deliberately targeted, it appears. Reports claim that more than 40 people were killed and many more seriously injured. A spokesman for the Israeli government questioned the report on deaths and injury, claiming that the numbers of fatalities reported by Hamas or from within Gaza from other sources are not to be believed. The current claim of more that 55,000 fatalities is exaggerated according to the Israeli sources.
A cloud of misinformation, a flood of shit to question the validity of the sufferings of an twenty month long war which has reduced Gaza to rubble and is currently starving the population through the controlled distribution of aid, using food and critical supplies as a weapon of war. A constant refrain of 7 October where 1200 Israelis were killed and 250 people taken as hostages a Hamas attack, the planning of which was noted, but ignored by Mossad and the Israeli government, as justification for the demolition of any habitable building in the Gaza Strip and the killing of civilians, women children who are ‘human shields used by Hamas’.
How well has “flooding the zone with shit” worked?
For the wealthiest in America up to the 1920s, it worked quite well. For the working people, not so well. The house of cards collapsed with the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression which really only finished with the commencement of WWII where America was well placed to sell the weapons and infrastructure of war.
For Germany? They lost the war and were shamed by the blatant genocide which was conducted. But with the help of the Marshall Plan was able to rebuild to become the dominant economy in Europe today.
China’s story too is interesting. From the self-induced poverty inflicted by both The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, to opening up the country for foreign investment through the diplomacy of Richard Nixon in 1972, the industrial dreams and the capital flows generated enabled China to become the power house economy it is today. The driving force was the acceptance of Western industrial investment in building the productive capacity of China.
Cambodia is slowly rebuilding, but remains an under-performing economy in South East Asia.
It is too early to see where Trump’s efforts to “flood the zone with shit” will lead us, but current indications are not too positive with the declining value of the US dollar and the continual rise of national debt. The unpredictability of the President as he makes announcement, signs executive orders and back tracks in an on again, off again vacillation, it appears that there is no real substance in the policies being enacted. The only one which appears to have any consistency is the “illegal immigrant” policy of removing undesirables from the USA.
The current situation with Israel is changing with the possibility of a case fire being negotiated with he view to ending the war on Gaza. No doubt the main motivation is for Donald Trump to push Bibi Netanyahu into accepting such a deal so that Trump can claim to be the peace maker and insist on the gong he has so desired for so long, the Nobel Peace Prize.
But where will Israel go? Will it become the peaceful haven for Jewish people who still so often claim victim status to justify denying the rights of Palestinians rights in a revised Two State Solution? Will the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Golan Heights cease?
Or will the ethnic cleansing and genocidal actions against Palestinians continue until the land is fully claimed as an ethnically pure Jewish state?
Or will we continue to see the misinformation and kow-towing to Israeli and American (and British, and European, and Australian) supporting in effect the genocide we see on our screens day after day as the Palestinian population is decimated.
Just “Flood the zone with shit,” so truth is obscured, so questions remain unanswered, so humanitarian efforts are ignored or branded as anti-semitic, terrorist or some other term of disparagement.
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Friendly reminder. Our very own Gough Whitlam – Australia’s last real Labor prime minister – beat Tricky Dicky to China. It was Whitlam not Nixon who “opened” China to western investment.
Let’s be frank. At this particular era of the cosmic experiment of having a biped hominid ape seemingly capable of abstract thought and complex language let loose in the environment on this little blue orb we call Earth, it would seem, to any impartial observer, that things aren’t working out well for all concerned… including all other sentient forms from microbiota through to the flora and fauna manifestations including reptilian, mammalian, piscean, avian, insectivorean and so on.
Crystal balling… how long have we got before the ‘flooding the zone with shit’ simply overwhelms homeostatic systems that have sustained life forms for millions of years?
A decade? Fifty years? A century?
Nobody knows for sure, but let’s, as suggested at the outset, be frank: we’ve pretty much so shat in the nest to the extent that our future, as we now perceive our present, is far from guaranteed.
A great read, with which I agree. Trump by flooding the world with shit, is taking control as we don’t seem to have the will to deny him!! The almighty US dollar combined with weak politicians will see a decline in what we refer to as Democracy and an increase in Authoritarianism. World wide there are signs of public unrest, which governments are attempting to control, will they succeed?
We’ve had the ‘enclosures’, the papal bulls of Alexander VI, the 2nd ‘enclosures’ (1800s), the perpetual wars of the ‘West’, the rise of imperialism and the ‘nation state’, the advent of corporations and the industrial revolution, and the 20thC wars. Throughout that history the world became locked into brutality and greed controlled by royalty and the wealthy elite, and criminality for sale by opportunists, freebooters and pirates.
Nothing has changed, except, convenient to them all, an overburden of laws, stacked on an irrelevant precedence of arcane culture and thought. Laws with loopholes one could drive a truck loaded with gold through. With a constancy of propaganda designed to keep the madding crowd at bay or available as serfs and cannon fodder.
Such nonsense has reached its apogee, with the ordinary folk mostly realizing that the ring-fencing applied is culturally divisive and utterly unnecessary, and the cost of maintaining that ring-fencing has now reached globally destructive proportions.
Today’s flooding the zone with shit has reached a level of babble comprehensible to no-one. Accordingly, the ‘rules-based-order’ is crumbling, along with the nations whose beholden wordsmiths and bean-counters that devised it.
The door for change is no longer ajar, it’s swinging wide open, and the journey beyond that door has started, is likely to be painful, yet absolutely necessary. I’d rather put my faith in the ‘quiet’ young ones, than the stale unimaginative old cronies who are currently screeching scared shitless.
On Monday the Israeli military used a 500lb (230kg) bomb – a powerful and indiscriminate weapon that generates a massive blast wave and scatters shrapnel over a wide area – when it attacked a target in a crowded beachfront cafe in Gaza killing between 24 and 36 people and injuring dozens more.
Thes folk were not there by accident and weren’t just sipping an Espresso, they were there to use the cafe Wi-Fi and they were targeted by the IDF.
‘Experts in international law said the use of such a munition despite the known presence of many unprotected civilians, including children, women and elderly people, was almost certainly unlawful and may constitute a war crime.’
An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said the attack on the cafe was under review and that “prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians using aerial surveillance”.
As Mitch McConnell would probably say They’ll get over it!
In Australia we have our own shit shower known as the Murdoch Media Manipulation Monopoly. Then there is the numerous pressure groups employed to insure that all the benefit flow to the bosses rather than the workers. Think IPA for example.
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Indeed, some of these spawn ill-experienced, self-serving, egotistical know it alls as political candidates who become elected politicians ….. Think James Patterson, the empty vessel that creates a cacophony in the media.
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Indeed, the last nine (9) years of COALition misgovernment was an on-going shit shower of irrelevancy for the voters. THe representative of the NOtional$ in New England is an expert practitioner of this strategy to make a big noise while making little sense.
Terry, thank you for your comment. When we consider the language used to discriminate agains Palestinians, basically a dehumanisation of them, the comment by the IDF was probably accurate in their eyes, there were no people there, there were no Israelis, just terrorists and other less than humans.
And that really is the language we hear repeatedly as justification is raised for the ongoing conflict…. and it is the same sort of language used by the Nazi when talking about the Jews and Gypsies they despised.
Yes, you are correct Max, Gough was the first, but he did not bring with him the executive teams of Coca cola and other industrials looking for cheap labour to decimate USA’s labour force and maximise profits from the insatiable hunger of materialism which so captured American culture…. oh yes, and ours.
Bert
The sad thing is that the Trumpian era has seen the debasement of international law and the rules based order that we had been striving towards since the end of WWII and the formation of the United Nations – now also neutered.
Bizarrely our media is flooded with news on the outcome of the trial of one Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs somebody who is irrelevant in the broader scheme of things when you consider that a man with an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes is able to travel to the US, visit the POTUS and our media are silent and democratic governments and their legal authorities are not demanding his apprehension. Indeed, were we to insist that he be taken into custody instantly on landing in the US we would be accused of antisemitism.
What a crazy world we live in !
Terry, to some extent it is a progression from the Bush era where lies and obfuscation were used to rationalise a war in Iraq. And it far more compelling to watch the anguish and subsequent celebration of a sax criminal rather than even countenance a war criminal being brought to justice.
On the Trump thing, it is interesting to see the whoa over Hilary Clinton’s personal computer use as being ‘corrupt’ but a blind eye is turned to the blatant corruption of the Trump family, the monetising of the presidency for personal and family gain.
But please do’t mention any of that to any one…. nothing to see there.
Yes it is a crazy world Terry, but as with all these things, it is like a pendulum… it will swing back to a sense of normalcy. Whether I live to see that remains to be seen.