When this morning I saw the above new US Trump map, I came to think of Frank Zappa, The Mothers of Invention, who said that politics is the entertainment division of the Military-Industrial Complex.
That formulation beats many academic analyses – as you will have understood when you listen carefully to today’s geopolitical and geopolitical (male) experts who, most likely, the next 48 hours will be beating the above dead Trump Hormuz horse that doesn’t even qualify as a horse in the first place.
What is really dead in today’s international politics is the meaningful, experienced, knowledge-based intellectual argument.
I mean, how do you argue intellectually with people who say – for instance – that they want Greenland (and other territories), that Denmark must watch out or Hamas may come and take it, that all Russians are crazy, that armament is the only road to peace, that genocide is OK as Israeli self-defence, that the ICC is dangerous, that the UN and its Charter are ridiculous, that “we” have an exceptional right to systematically violate international law and to punish “them” if they do? And calls every attack an act of deterrence and self-defence?
How do you argue with people who believe that every alternative to the rampant, contemporary, omnipresent madness of the West is ‘unrealistic,’ ‘naive,’ ‘wishful thinking’ and that peace, by the way, is irrelevant, and that the world must instead be changed by employing more violence, whether armed revolution or nukes?
How do you argue with people who are swept off their feet by the – kakistocratic – US and EU/NATO ‘leaders’ and declare that “we” are already in the first stage of the Third World War – for which they have no theory and no historical evidence; they only deprive people of hope and the wish to do something to stop the madness?
How do you put up an argument with people who are ignorant of basic theories, concepts and facts and/or suffer from dementia, are morally and/or economically corrupt, and lie, steal and cheat without a second of hesitation? People who talk as if they never read even a small book about the subject they lecture their citizens about?
How should we feel about surgery performed by people who never opened a textbook in medicine? (Kakistocracy means governance by the least able and least good people…)
How do you communicate with media people who only produce narratives that are underpinned by lies, propaganda, one-sided threat images, loads of omissions and no longer know how to spell the word ‘journalism’?
And what do you do when there is no longer any space or need for political satire – politics having become a caricature of itself?
It is indeed no wonder there is no Tom Lehrer or Monty Python today, with Western politics having transformed itself into a self-destructive Theatre of the Absurd à la Beckett or Ionesco – with actors on the stage mistakenly believing that they have God On Their Side?
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Is there, under such perverse circumstances, still an intellectually meaningful thing to do?
I have no doubt there is.
It is to ignore this militarist and war entertainment – although people love to focus on weapons and wars – and speak up only about the fully possible alternatives, fully possible if we commit ourselves to solid knowledge, creative dissidence and vision-making and liberative dialogues way outside the doomsday self-imprisonment.
I refuse to devote more than 1% of my energy on Trump and other kakistocrats, doomsday visions. I refuse to engage in critique so utterly devoid of constructive intent it might as well have been archaeological remains.
World history has seen dark times before. The present militarist kakistocracy will fail, consuming itself in failure – and then fall. No, we cannot be sure it will not be even more destructive, but fear is a non-starter.
When that has happened, the emerging new and better world for all will unfold and gain speed.
And it is for its peace and development we must prepare ourselves.
Now.