When words lose their meaning

The little shrike that broke the neck of Ukrainian democracy continues to fire his ministers and generals. He wants longer-range missiles from NATO and permission to use them to strike deep inside Russia.

“They are killing our citizens. That’s why we want to deter them, we want to stop them, we don’t want their planes to come closer to our borders to bomb the cities,” (Ukrainian Defense Minister) Umerov told CNN.

If I didn’t believe what the US government is telling me, I would think that this sounds exactly like what Russia has been saying since the collapse of the Minsk I and II agreements in 2014 and 2015, brokered by NATO and the EU.

NATO membership, with its advertised “security benefits,” has been pushed just out of reach for an increasingly glazed Ukrainian government. Membership is a word that has no meaning. Those security benefits must practical provided, even if they are unlawful, fanciful or illegal.

NATO’s vastly exaggerated defensive goal is to “defend” the vastly exaggerated “independent” country of Ukraine, and the US-UK war on Russia for resources and political dominance must continue. With or without NATO, we must have “NATO,” says Umerov.

Something similar happened last month in the US. It was announced that with or without democracy, we must have “democracy”. In order to achieve this goal, it became necessary for the ruling party/deep state to carry out a soft coup against the sitting president, and implant a new democratic figurehead, without a single democratic vote. Just before that, the same group, or a group serving them, had attempted a hard coup against the leading opposition candidate for president. The July 13 coup failed, while the July 21 soft coup “succeeded”.

An American Zelensky – lacking the charm and intelligence of the original – has been lauded by the American and European media in the name of democracy, joyful democracy. Because joy is one of the best ways to combat fascism in our brave new world. Everyone knows this.

With or without democracy, or joy, we must have democracy and joy, even if it takes hard and soft coups, even if it takes manufacturing a hot nuclear war with Russia/China/Iran. We have no president who is awake or convincing; the vice president is incomprehensible and superficial. A mysterious “team” runs the US and has the nuclear codes. Democracy without democracy, Article 5 of the NATO charter for everyone.

L’Estat est Humpty Dumpty is as contemptuous as ever, and more brutal. We are to be infantilized, frozen in a pre-linguistic state, with only groans and screams of pain, fear, or hunger to communicate with each other and our government. The state allows words no objective meaning; words mean what the state wants them to mean.

We don’t need NATO, we don’t need a US-dominated “rules-based system”, and we clearly don’t need “democracy”. We have the words, without the objective realities. NATO functions like a giant toilet in constant flushing mode, draining resources, freedom and peace by the second. The US rules-based system is no rules for the US, and subjugation for any country that doesn’t fall in line with the US, in the moment, unencumbered by what has been. The US rules-based system has waged false flag wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and fake-flagged democracy on a host of countries in Europe, South America and Asia. It kills, lies, steals and destroys under the rule of no rules. Increasingly, the same lawlessness is being practiced here at home, complete with militarized door-kicking and sea-to-sea flashing.

The word ‘genocide’ is an excellent example of a real-world case.

Two years ago, Biden declared that Russia was carrying out genocide in Ukraine, in a war he and NATO initiated and financed, to eliminate Russian influence in Russian Donbass and replace the current Russian leadership. Yet the same man/administration/mysterious-ruling-team consistently denies that Israel has carried out genocide in Gaza. While Russia displays the patience and diligence of a Tibetan monk halfway through a mandala, we have Netanyahu and much of a shrinking, panicked Israel literally shooting children in the head, cheering the anal rape of Arab prisoners, and demanding the complete annihilation of Palestinians. The Israeli government is shuffling and rerouting 2 million Gazans across 42 million tons of rubble, with a ridiculous “pause” to give polio vaccinations to the previously younger targets. 21 tons, or over 46,000 pounds of rubble per person, for every Gazan. That’s one fully loaded concrete truck per person, or, even more vividly, 3.5 fully mature bull elephants per person.

If Israel were to release 7 million adult bull elephants into Gaza, we might get some perspective. Maybe one of the many animal rights groups would finally stand up and say, “Stop the genocide!” in the name of fair treatment for elephants. Of course, this is also unrealistic, as there are less than half a million elephants on the planet. How odd that fictional, non-existent elephants seem “more real” than what is actually happening in Gaza, paid for by American taxpayers because the team the US is running believes it is a good thing.

The American authoritarian state has embraced antiphrasis in a childish way—not as a rhetorical device to challenge our understanding or to entertain us, but in an attempt to mislead, cajole, and soothe like a restless baby. Our ever-mysterious authoritarian state may no longer know what words mean. Given this, we certainly cannot trust the state to make the necessary call from on high, “Houston, we have a problem!”

The beginning of wisdom, said Confucius, is to call things by their right names. It is the antidote we all need.

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