“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
– Samuel P. Huntington

The White Empire took Asia by taking and remaking its forts, using superior cannon and siege weaponry. The Portuguese took the Strait of Hormuz in 1515 and the British took Perim in Bab el Mandeb in 1799 and they are only now being wrested free. How? The same way they were tooken. With superior forts, cannon, and siege weaponry.

Iran and the Axis of Resistance have redefined forts as being underground. Under entire mountains, as in Iran and Yemen, or even under a concentration camp as in Palestine, these have proven to be superior. We had forts before, but the colonizer always wrested them. Now the modern underground fort has been tested in war, and bested them.

The Axis of Resistance has also redefined cannon. While the Empire drifted away from land-based cannon, because they were always bombing people far from home, the people of the land innovated on them. Now Iran and Yemen have 'cannon' that can be fired from its mountain fortresses and quickly withdrawn, and the 'cannonball' can find their targets from across continents. It's a brave new day and the cowardly colonizers have little or nothing to do with it.

As Samuel P. Huntington said, the White Empire won the world by its superiority in applying organized violence and it loses it the same way. To superior, well-organized violence. A 21st century shift in weapons and tactics that they're on the wrong side of. The Empire occupied and monopolized trade around the world using fortresses and cannon and they lose their occupation bases and monopolies to superior cannon and fortress. As the Axis of Resistance has proven.

Historical Background

I will speak somewhat from memory here because Sri Lanka is dotted with forts (Galle, Matara, Jaffna, Mannar, Colombo), still with their cannon. I have a lived memory of them, and know how they changed hands over and over. First the Portugeuse, the Dutch, then the British. The cannon always pointed outwards, because they fought amongst each other, but the fortress was always there for our plundering. Now the Americans do it from a giant embassy, but it's the same thing. These forts have been here so long that it's easy to think that this is the only way to trade. Like that new Jewish saying, 'if I don't steal it, someone else will.' But this tyrannical sort of trade is, in fact, profoundly unnatural.

People traded fine around the Indian Ocean before the White Empire fortressified everything. We had Tamil sailors manning Chinese boats, coins from the Roman Empire, goods from the Muslim World. I'm not saying that people didn't fight, but there wasn't a monopoly of violence across the entire ocean. It's not some natural law that you need to trade this way, it is, in fact, a historical anomaly.

Speaking from Sri Lanka, the entire Indian Ocean has a longer history of trade that was just, trade. Zheng He (a Chinese Muslim) came here in the 1420s and gave us stuff. Ibn Battuta came even earlier in the 1300s, marking our connection to the Muslim World. We have had trade with India since time immemorial. None of these traders set up forts to violently extort us because they were traders. They had stuff and exchanged it, quite often more stuff than us. Zheng He really just left gifts and bounced. Unlike broke-ass Europeans (not coincidentally turned white because they had so little solar energy), people in what's now called the Global South had plentiful energy (recorded on our coincidentally colored skin) and could trade amongs ourselves without depending on coercion. Always remember this, we didn't come looking for them, they came looking for us.

When the energy poor Europeans came here they actually didn't have much to trade with. All the violent tribes of Europe had to offer us was superior violence, so they took. Beginning with the Portugeuse they locked down trade using violence, such extraordinary violence that it required extraordinary cannon and forts. Then they monopolized our trade amongst each other (White people don't even use spices) and started sucking the profits (ie, energy) north. The Whites fought amongst each other for this monopoly trade so long that we think this it the only way to trade, but it's not. Such unnatural trade was only held in place by artificial violence. But nature is healing, inshallah.

What Iran is establishing is trade outside of this monopoly of violence. All Yemen wants is the same, the right to move around and exist on their own terms. Same for China, same for Russia, North Korea, Cuba, et cetera. This is what unites all of the White Empire's enemies, not their political systems, not their religion, not freedom or human rights or any other such marketing phrases used by inveterate slavers and inhuman corporations. The White Empire is run by Corporate AI, not humans, and it's never been personal, it's strictly business. They want a monopoly on trade and they attack any independent nation that threatens this.

When they first arrived, we hadn't evolved the organized violence to fight them because for centuries we hadn't needed it. Why would China need to violently impose trade with Sri Lanka when they had more stuff than us? They could just come here and trade stuff normally, which they mostly didn't because they simply weren't interested. Why would the Muslim World pepper us with forts? We were happy to trade pepper for their fancy system. It's only when broke-ass Europeans came that they broke the system, and quite effectively played us against each other. There was a huge amount of energy released by them networking the continents (in their desparation) and for a brief period (500 years) they were able to profit from being middlemen with superior violence. Other people had, of course, evolved mostly land-based violence, but no one else was this aggressively amphibious (and later, avariciously avian).

At the beginning Whites (their energy poverty reflected on their skin) had little to trade but organized violence and weapons, which is to say they didn't trade they're terrorized and took shit. Remember, they came looking for us, we didn't come looking for them! Much of the trade that enriched Europe wasn't between us and them, but between ourselves, with them monopolizing the profits. For example, the Whites grew opium in India to violently force on China. Warmer peoples never resorted to such lows as inter-continental drug dealing because we were not that broke. We were really not prepared for the violence that came out of the Asian ghetto called Europe.

I can still see that violence dotted around my island as forts, and the historical lesson I learned over and over was that they fought over these forts, and whoever held the fort won. That's how Sri Lanka passed from the Portugeuse to the Dutch to the British to now the Americans (their Embassy is horrifyingly large). They violently controlled trade not just with them (which was negligible at first) but with each other (which was a lot, literally the world). The controlled trade with sieges then, now with sanctions, but it's the same phenomenon. Coming to its natural denounement. After many millions dead and the climate burning, unfortunately. Shout-out the whales, also, they got it the worst.

That's why what Iran, Yemen and the Axis of Resistance is doing is so important, led by the heroes of Palestine of course. They are taking the Empire's forts, one by one. They very physical occupation they girded us with. And they are outshooting the Empire's cannon, silencing the guns they used to extort the world. What Russia and China are doing is also important, one in hot war and the other trade war, a revenge best served cold. They are showing us that trade and development is possible with or without the Empire, and even against its worst intentions. It's taken long centuries but the natives are relentless and nature is healing, inshallah.

Present Foreground

That's the historical background, I guess, did I digress? Let's connect it back to the present, the rise of Bab el Mandeb to the Yemeni and the Strait of Hormuz to the Iranians, long centuries since losing them. Previously, I've spoken about how the Axis of Resistance is winning the missile and tunnel wars, ushering in a new paradigm of warfare. But is it really so new? What is a missile but a cannonball and what is a tunnel but a deeper fort? Yes, it's still just cannon and forts, the age-old battle betwixt shield and sword. The Persian Gulf is lost the same way the Portugeuse took it, through cannon and fort. This was how they held power and how they lose it. This is the only language colonizers understand, superior violence.

The great innovation of 21st century warfare has been tunnel forts and smart missiles (and drones). Palestine first showed it, in their daring escape from and resistance from under the concentration camp the Whites made of Gaza. Then Yemen showed the same model when they defeated the US Navy in the Red Sea. And Iran demonstrated the same thing when they not only held Iran but destroyed all the US bases surrounding them. The Portuguese conquered Hormuz in 1515 and it's taken over 500 years to get it back! But we got it, homies, we got it. And these guys have changed history.

Can you believe it? I see the same damned Portugeuse Fort in my own country, built by slave labor, passed among Whites so they can rape us, and I have to pinch myself. It's really happening. We're finally beating them. In West Asia, sure, but I'll take it as an Asian.

The White Empire today is still dependent on 20th century weapons which are, in many cases, worse than 15th century ones. Modern American forts are exposed containers and just regular buildings out in the sun. Their old forts were stone while the new ones are basically cardboard. And they do not have much modern cannon at all, they got so used to strafing the poor from air cavalry that their missile technology has barely evolved.

For many years the Empire has ruled by fiat, not forts, sanctions, not sieges. I usually say it's the same thing because it has the same effects, but these are not the same causes. The White Empire has ruled for decades not by the consent of the government but by the lack of concerted opposition. Iran accepted American bases across the Persian Gulf and other countries accepted American sanctions. People, more than we should have, forgave and were content to live under the White Empire. Iran wanted to lift sanctions through negotiation, Russia broached joining NATO, China preaches win-win at ever occassion. Despite them being degenerate thieves and rapists, we gave the White Empire every chance to preside as elder statesman, but they can't do it. White supremacy is the only content to White Empire and they have to go out the way they came in, violently. They know no other language.

Since the White Empire monopolized global trade it was held by force, literally by forts. And if you didn't like it you didn't get missives, you got missiles down the throat. This was the deal and they held it even after they lost the power to enforce it, by sheer inertia. I think there remained that foolish idea that Whites could become human and just trade like normal people if we gave them long enough but they can't and they won't and they forced the point themselves, by starting multiple land wars in Asia. The force was implied, but the minute they made it explicit, everyone could see that they were a spent farce.

Now they're losing fortress Ukraine in North West Asia and every base in South West Asia and can't even start in East Asia, though I don't put anything past them, who knows. They monopolized global trade using superior violence, made real through unassailable forts and assault weapons, and they lose their monopoly the same way, to superior tunnel forts and missiles and drones. But lose to what?

What Comes Next

The common thinking among even avowed anti-imperialists is still basically imperialist. They think some empire has to replace this one, like the succession of Portugeuse, Dutch, British, inscribed in Sri Lanka's historical forts and collective trauma. If I don't steal it, someone else will, as the new Jewish saying goes, or 'the dark forest theory' of Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem books. But this thinking is a historical anomaly we need to think beyond now. You can't be an anti-imperialist imperialist, but you can try and be yourself, in your own land, without hegemony imposed by air and sea.

Land-based empires, forts, trade wars, fine, that sort of fighting goes on all the time. But networks of naval bases to monopolize global trade? That's an anomaly that's seen its time. No one monopolized trade in the Indian Ocean the way the Whites did. Violent trade monopolies are not a necessary evil, they're just evil. I'm not saying there weren't trade disputes and that there wasn't violence and conquest, I'm saying that there wasn't a monopoly of violence sold as peace and a monopoly of conquest sold as freedom. There wasn't one energy flow with most surplus going north (the unipolar world), there was lots of trade going across, in a multipolar world. And that is what we can and inshallah are returning to.

Iran is not replacing the Persian Gulf bases (though I think those borders certainly need to be redrawn, make UAE Oman again and, hell, make Saudi Yemeni). If you look at the way the Axis of Resistance is structured, it's not proxies and buffer states like the Empire does (and accuses everybody else of). Iran is not trying to dominate Yemen, on the other side of the horn. And if you look at the way China operates, they're not monopolistic with its Belt and Road. And Russia isn't owning the new Arctic route. Everyone is trying to just do their own thing, and what the vanguard in Yemen is saying is either everyone can trade or no one can trade. This is kinda the way it was before. And this is possible.

This is what is at stake in World War III. The White Empire is fighting to hold on to the world by force, and the world is struggling to be free many different ways at once. There is no particular alliance between everyone fighting America, but they are all fighting for the same thing. Freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from a monopoly of trade, that says everything has to go through them. And how is that freedom won? The same way it was lost, through cannon and fort.

Veteran and respected investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulizter Prize in 1970 for reporting on the United States government’s coverup of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, just published an article on Substack that says the Epstein Files are being withheld from the public by both prominent political parties in the United States because Epstein was an asset for both the Israeli intelligence organization Mossad and the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), but stops short of saying Epstein also worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

This is similar to what I was surprised to have uncovered in my reporting on the coverup and protection of Jeffrey Epstein in my home state of New Mexico by powerful local law enforcement and political figures, many of whom are still in power.

Unlike Hersh’s conclusions, however, my conclusions indicate Epstein was also an asset of the CIA. The extreme harassment and physical attacks against me only began after I published a headline that said exactly that, which, if you’re trying to convince me I was WRONG about that, is a lousy strategy.

Regardless, I am glad to finally see someone of Hersh’s caliber reporting — albeit behind a paywall — that Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring and financial favors were not just the oddities of one depraved pedophile “financier” and his sparkly, quirky heiress girlfriend, but rather the modus operandi of United States and Israeli joint intelligence agencies conspiring to control powerful people in our own and foreign governments, royalty, banking and business, by using illegal sex acts and bribes to blackmail them into compliance, with compliance likely including sneaking nuclear weapons secrets to Israel out of New Mexico’s weapons labs. Full. Stop.

The entire United States government does not want its citizens to know any of this, because it would not be something most Americans would or could tolerate.

While the American public seems to have an insanely high tolerance for violence against migrants and criminalized Others, there does seem to be some sort of a line for most of them, drawn at “trafficking defenseless white American girls to rich men to blackmail them, and using our tax dollars to do it.” This is why no president has released the complete files or ever will. This is why the New Mexico Epstein “Truth” Commission is actually the opposite of truth. This is why I got hit with a directed energy weapon and run out of my own country, and then had that experience gaslit by Democrat-funding fake-news outlets on Substack. Neither party wants the files released, because, let’s face it: Neither party is really in charge of anything. Intelligence agencies are in charge. Ours, and Israel’s. With the help of Palantir.

A couple of weeks ago, I started getting a bunch of ranting, borderline-unhinged-sounding emails from a person who said they were an old guy in Santa Fe. They started with him asking me, repeatedly, for the details of my Paypal account so that he could send me $500. I did not respond.

I don’t use Paypal because years ago, when I owned a small scone bakery that supplied pastries to Albuquerque-area coffeeshops, that Paypal was hacked and used to clean out my entire bank account.

I ignored the emails, because I unfortunately get a lot of loony emails from a lot of people. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could have made enough money with the bakery to just spend my days making scones.

The same man continued to email me, despite my lack of response, this time to say he loved my work and had reached out to Seymour Hersh on my behalf, to ask him to work with me. He then sent me what he said was the reply from Hersh, saying something about how he would love to meet me and would be happy to fly out to wherever I was now to meet me, that I seemed to have the information he was lacking to put together all the pieces of an Epstein puzzle he was working on, that if I agreed to meet Hersh I would be rewarded by Hersh introducing me to “the most powerful literary agents in New York.”

I read it all, and felt a deep and dreadful unease.

First of all, I am not about to give any strangers my exact address right now — and this request to come meet me came at the same time several other entities, including my former literary agency in New York, the one that had connected me to a Zionist Hollywood go-agent who ghosted me the second I defending Palestinians, was suddenly trying to get my new address in Spain from me to send me two boxes of book that had been returned to them from one of my old addresses two years ago. Yeah, no.

Second, the idea that I would WANT to be introduced to the most powerful literary agents in New York was laughable. Been there, done that, never again, thanks. They’re almost all Zionists. They work with Zionist producers and executives in Hollywood, to catch and kill the kinds of books and stories I write, to control and destroy people like me. I am blacklisted in the New York publishing world and in Hollywood because of my outspoken stance on genocide always being wrong, even when Israel commits it.

So, naturally, I did not answer the old man in Santa Fe, even when he dangled Seymour Hersh and New York literary agents in front of me like some clueless carrot. (I created my own publishing company and digital news magazine in the past couple of years precisely because I do NOT want to work with the establishment in New York anymore.)

A few days passed, and the same guy then sent me an email that sounded like every email every woman who rejected an entitled narcissistic man of any kind has ever gotten — telling me things like “oh, you think you’re too good to answer me, huh?” and “I gave you $500, that should grant me access to you” and “at least an acknowledgement you got these emails,” the “bitch” was implied. Dear reader, this man never sent me money. But if he had, that would have been his choice and certainly not a ticket to enter my life nor find out where I live.

I mention all of this because the timing of … All Of This … seems off.

Why does Hersh, in this new article, go out of his way to say in his headline that Epstein was Mossad and FBI but not CIA? When paired with the strange emails from the supposed guy in Santa Fe, and his forwarded emails from the supposed Seymour Hersh, teamed up with the multiple attempts from multiple angles to figure out exactly where I am right now, after moving to another continent for safety … it all feels a bit … no se que.

That said, I am glad a famous and respected reporter like Hersh, a man with the accolades and institutional backing to be taken seriously by the rest of the corporate news media world, is finally saying what has been glaringly obvious to anyone who bothered to look.

Jeffrey Epstein was one of “ours.” And his child sex trafficking ring was OUR child sex trafficking ring.

That’s why you’re never getting the files. Because the horrors therin were the product of you own tax dollars, your own government, your own intelligence agencies. Because they are proof that the nation that for decades has done obscenities and atrocities to countless Others around the world was also fully capable of doing the same thing to its own people. The Epstein Files are the smoking gun that points to the moment the United States stopped belonging to its own people are began belonging to Israel and global oligarchs.

The files are not being withheld, as the DNC would like you to believe, just to protect Trump. It’s to protect the entire United States intelligence and defense community. It’s to protect the entire IDEA of what the United States even is.

In other words, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell operated a child-and-adult sex trafficking ring and Other Means of Bribery for decades, with the knowledge and support of the intelligence agencies of the United States of America and Israel. Even Seymour Hersh says so.

Maybe now, I won’t be the only voice out there willing to say it plainly.

Maybe now, your favorite “independent” journalists who have only been focusing on WHAT Epstein did will finally have the guts to talk about the terrifying WHY he did it at all: Because Uncle Sam and Israel wanted him to.

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The last act of death is not mortality but the erasure of memory.

Chris Hedges ScheerPost

MECHANIC FALLS, Maine — I am standing in Maple Grove Cemetery in Mechanic Falls, Maine. In front of me, within a radius of a few feet, are three rectangular granite headstones that read “HEDGES,” “BLAIR” and “PRINCE.”

Before me lie the remains of my parents, grandparents, two uncles and my aunt. The grass is parched and yellowed. There are small American flags placed in round metal holders, slightly askew, next to each gravestone.

All of the men were World War II veterans. My father was an Army sergeant in North Africa and the Middle East. Uncle Ellsworth was in the Merchant Marine and went back and forth in the North Atlantic convoys. Uncle Morris fought on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and Luzon in the Philippines, where he was wounded. My grandfather, Philip Prince, an Army master sergeant, trained troops in Texas.

Besides being identified as veterans, there is little information available from these plots, although my father is named as the Rev. Thomas Hedges. The women, including my mother, who was an English professor, have almost nothing to identify them. Their names. Their dates of birth and death.

Patriarchy rules, even in death.

Service to the war machine of the state confers the ultimate status, especially in small, rural towns, although my father and Uncle Morris loathed war and the military. Uncle Morris returned from the South Pacific and drank himself to death as he struggled with physical and emotional wounds. My father, unlike my other relatives, refused to have a gun in the house. He became a pacifist after the war and an anti-war activist during the war on Vietnam. He told me as a boy that if the Vietnam War was still being fought when I was 18, and if I was drafted, he would go to prison with me.

I carry that image, my father and I, in a cell.

I feel grief and loss. But I also feel something else. These individuals loom large in my consciousness. They visit me in dreams. They carry the gargantuan imprint our immediate family makes on us, for good or ill.

I can summon up their faces and voices.

Small, insignificant moments in our lives, like old-time movie reels, play in my head. Fishing in trout streams with my grandfather. Duck hunting in icy waters on the Maine coast with Uncle Ellsworth. Sitting in a hard wooden pew during my father’s sermons. Arguing with my mother — which I did frequently — about William Faulkner, who I loved and who she did not. My slight and wickedly funny grandmother in her apron, cooking French toast on the white porcelain stove. Uncle Morris, disheveled and seated at my grandparents’ small kitchen table, his breath smelling of alcohol, which no one else in our family drank. Aunt Miriam, who we called Auntie Mim, who had no children and who doted on my sister, brother and me.

I always wanted to be a writer.

My mother, even before I could read, would type up my stories and staple them together in little pamphlets. When I arrived at my grandparents’ house, which burned down shortly after my grandmother died, I would climb upstairs to find yellow legal pads and neat rows of sharpened pencils laid out on a birdseye maple sewing table.

Lunch in rural communities is the big meal. Not dinner. My grandmother, when it was time to eat, would shout up the narrow stairs, “Christafa,” in the thick Maine accent that colored the speech of my relatives.

The red wooden barn, where swings hung from the thick beams for us as children and where I hand-tied fishing flies with my grandfather, is a pile of broken timber.

My grandfather, who smoked a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day and died at 85, unsurprisingly, of emphysema, would mix batches of Prince’s Insect Repellent in the barn. He poured it into small amber-colored glass bottles to sell to gun and tackle shops.

One afternoon, he took me out to the barn and made me put my hand on a Bible.

“Swear you will never tell this formula to anyone,” he intoned.

I promised.

He then made me doubly swear not to divulge it to my mother, his daughter. They had a fraught relationship, given his domineering personality and my mother’s formidable resistance.

Love is imperfect.

I am alone in the Maple Grove Cemetery. There is nothing to stop me from speaking to the empty space. I tell them I love them. I tell them I miss them.

I carry memories of a few dramatic intervals in our lives. Mostly, I carry mundane interactions of daily existence, which death makes sacred.

Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town is set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire between 1901 and 1913. In the play Emily Gibbs dies at 26 giving birth to her second child. She joins the dead in the town cemetery. She defies the advice of the departed townspeople around her and returns to earth to relive one happy day.

She goes back to the day of her 12th birthday. It is dawn.

No one from her past can see or hear her as she speaks to them.

“I can’t bear it,” Emily says as she watches her birthday celebration. “They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old?”

“Oh, Mama,” she implores, “just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it — don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.”

“I can’t,” she goes on. “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.”

Emily breaks down sobbing.

“Take me back — up the hill — to my grave,” Emily says. “But first: Wait! One more look.”

She looks left, out past the audience and then to the right.

“Good-by, Good-by, world,” she says. “Good-by, Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Emily and the other spirits watch the stars come out over Grover’s Corners. She admits she should have listened to them.

It was a mistake to return.

“Yes, now you know,” Simon Stimson, the bitter, alcoholic choirmaster, tells Emily. “Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”

“Simon Stimson,” Emily’s mother-in-law Mrs. Gibbs says, “that ain’t the whole truth and you know it.”

Emily’s husband George comes to the cemetery. He throws himself on her grave. He does not speak.

“They don’t understand, do they?” Emily says.

“No dear,” Mrs. Gibbs says. “They don’t understand.”

It is dusk in Maple Grove Cemetery. It is time to leave.

My generation will follow the generation before me. This is the ancient rhythm of existence.

Death comes faster than we imagine. It robs us of all that is most precious. I carry these dead with me. I will carry them until I, too, depart. They remind me of my obligation to the living. They remind me, as the poets and sages tell us, that life is sacred, that love must always be honored, that our existence is brief, that human beings are fragile, that one day the memories we carry will vanish, that we are made from dust, and to dust we will return.

Live, the dead whisper, while you can.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist

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Nate Bear Do Not Panic

Finland, often known as the happiest country in the world, now has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, demand for food aid has exploded by more than 70%, and homelessness, which had been declining for more than ten years, has increased 34% in just two years. Conditions in the country are so bad that almost 20% of Finland’s population is now considered at risk of poverty,

Once considered the standard bearer for the good life, for competent governance and a strong social state, Finland is unravelling at warp speed. What has gone wrong so quickly?

In three words, NATO, austerity and Russophobia.

All are linked. Finland is slashing its social state to the bone to meet NATO’s 5% GDP military spending target, a target which became necessary after the country abandoned neutrality and swapped the welfare state for the warfare state after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The speed of the collapse has been stunning.

In 2019, the at-risk of poverty rate was 11% and by 2022 the country was on course to hit record low unemployment.

Everything changed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the country’s hysterical over-reaction to an imagined threat. This is not just my judgement. A number of Finnish academics, including Heikki Patomäki, professor of world politics at the University of Helsinki, have said that the conditions simply did not warrant Finland joining NATO, cutting off its economically valuable links to Russia and militarising its border.

The facts support this.

At the time of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia had just a couple of thousand troops spread out across various bases on its 1,340 km border with Finland. The bases were home to handful of missile defence batteries and a few dozen tanks. Many of the troops and much of the equipment was subsequently deployed to Ukraine, leaving the bases empty. There was obviously no invasion threat, and Putin in May 2022 emphasised this in a phone call to Finland’s then-president Sauli Niinistö.

But by this point, the Russophobia and hysteria for NATO membership had begun to take on a life of its own. Sanna Marin, Finland’s young female prime minister at the time, and a liberal media darling, was a particularly effective saleswoman. Despite claiming in the days following Russia’s invasion that there was no threat, her tone became decidedly more hawkish in the months that followed. She said Russia “poses a threat to all of us” and began talking like a war-time leader, saying in September 2022 that “Russia may challenge Finland, blackmail us and threaten us, but we will not give in.” Bear in mind, Russia at this point had practically zero troops and equipment on its western border with Finland. The Russian threat she was invoking was entirely imagined, an hallucination.

Nevertheless, in April 2023, Finland joined NATO, just days after Marin was defeated by the right and far-right in an election where the policy choice on Russia was one of uniformity, with the conservatives, the ethno-nationalists and Marin’s social democrats all singing the same tune.

After her defeat, Marin scuttled off to work for Tony Blair, while the new conservative-nationalist government set about decimating Finland’s welfare state to pay for the privilege of NATO membership.

The Finnish government is now a substantial way through its programme to cut €9 billion of public spending by 2027, including large reductions to social security (including housing, child, and unemployment benefits) healthcare, education, and municipal funding budgets, while it also increasing taxes on average earners. Cuts to healthcare provision have been particularly brutal, including a large reduction in hospital staff numbers, elderly care and disability services while redefining “minimum service obligations” to justify providing patients with lower quality care. The government has also slashed funding for organisations working on peace and initiatives which would address the new cold war-style relations with Russia.

In addition, the new government fully closed all the border crossings with Russia that Marin’s Social Democrats had partially closed, and began building large sections of a border fence, securitised with troops, night vision cameras and motion detectors.

And while the entire country is now suffering as a result of the pro-war paranoia that has gripped Finland’s leaders, its border towns have taken a particular beating.

Before the war, Russians routinely crossed to shop, eat, stay in hotels and visit holiday properties they owned in the towns and villages along the border. That has all gone away. One estimate cited in a recent Finnish study puts the loss of Russian tourism in the border region of South Karelia at as much as €1 million per day. Unemployment in some border regions is now approaching 20%.

The border also used to be an important commercial gateway between the EU and Russia, but its closure eliminated much of the road freight and transit business. The OECD says eastern Finland has gone from being an “economic gateway” to a “security barrier,” a transformation which of course it praises rather than mourns, claiming that confronting Russia is important not only for Finland but for Europe as a whole.

Then there are the commodities like gas and timber.

In 2021 Russia accounted for about 92% of Finland’s gas imports. Finland has replaced all of that with a mix of sources, including far more expensive LNG from the US, meaning that Finland, after having some of the lowest gas prices in Europe, now has the highest gas prices in Europe.

As for timber, in 2021, 70% of Finland’s wood imports came from Russia, and this wood supplied approximately 10% of all the raw wood used by Finnish industry. Pulp mills in Finland subsequently went bust and the industry faced shortages which persist to this day after the EU, with Finland’s support, banned countries from buying wood from Russia.

Finland’s decisions, both independently and collectively through the EU, have immiserated many millions of Finnish citizens. Yet at the same time as the country is slashing the social state, it is spending more money than ever, around $8.1 billion in 2025, on weapons of war to fight a threat that previously didn’t exist. A threat that Finland has made real by its new-found anti-Russia NATO militancy, with Putin promising to respond to Finland’s border build-up.

And among the beneficiaries of a new tooled-up and aggressive Finland are the arms dealers of the Israeli apartheid-genocide complex, which in 2024 sold Finland its questionably functional “David’s Sling” air defence system for €316 million. Finland has also bought tank and ship missiles from the Israeli company Rafael which supplied most of the weapons and equipment used to commit the genocide of Gaza. The Finnish government said Israel’s genocide of Gaza would not stop it buying weapons from the country, a position which is par for the course among the morally bankrupt leaders of Europe.

Finland is also spending €10 billion on US fighter jets, and a few billion euros on missiles and glide bombs to fire from those jets, as well as giving Ukraine €2.3 billion in direct military aid over three years.

It’s all utterly deranged, but completely unsurprising given the Russophobia which pervades all European halls of power and has become embedded on the continent.

Finland has effectively taken a scythe to all the things that made it, in the eyes of many, the envy of the world. The country has trashed the model which delivered such a high standard of living, a model which included neutrality and good relations with Russia.

Instead the country has enacted a self-imposed structural adjustment programme to pay for membership of a military alliance it didn’t need, with that membership creating an enemy that didn’t exist, an enemy which happens to be a nuclear superpower with which it shares a huge border.

The price has been, and will continue to be a steep one, and it is a price ordinary Finns will be paying for a long time.

But it is not just in Finland.

We are watching, across Europe, the shameful replacement of the welfare state with the warfare state while the merchants of genocide and death laugh all the way to the bank.

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We can only hope that these lead to an epidemic of ICE goons accidentally burning their own dicks off.

"With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars." That makes it hard for victims to sue.

"In today's society, you know, everybody's filming everything, everybody has a cell phone," Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But "the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars."

The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They've been described by groups like Amnesty International as "readily misused for torture." And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them. [...]

But local police across the country are still eagerly buying the gloves -- in large part so that they can harm people and avoid being sued for it. It's been successful "from the patrolmen to the jailers," Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. "It's been a great tool as far as mitigating liability," according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff's Department sung the GLOVE's praises, too: "I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that's looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Nate Bear Do Not Panic

I’ve held back on writing about the Russia-Ukraine war, and this article probably won’t win me many fans. But for better or worse, I always try to tell it how I, at least, see it. And I’m tired. Tired of the liberal delusion, the hypocrisy, the childish analysis, and outright bloodthirstiness over Ukraine.

I’m tired of the pretence that a proxy war which has now lasted longer that the first world war is a righteous battle against evil for the soul of the world.

I’m tired of the fact that wanting an end to a war which has killed hundreds of thousands of young men, and thousands of civilians, is seen by some as an outrageous, morally deplorable position.

I’m tired of the fact that rational analysis and context is so often labelled as pro-Putin apologia, and how it is almost impossible to get good information on the war that isn’t polluted by an anti-Russia agenda. And even good information and analysis which recognises that Russia isn’t losing, that Ukraine is suffering, still too often suggests that the west must wage this war for many more years. This otherwise rational analysis, while detailing all the ways in which Ukraine is definitely not winning the war, nevertheless concludes that it must be fought for many more years to avoid “a bad peace.”

Time and again we see the same conclusion. That to give Russia what it wants, namely Crimea, the four annexed oblasts and a neutral Ukraine, would be a “bad peace” that rewards aggression. But few politicians or journalists when selling this story ever spell out explicitly what a “good peace” is and what it would require. But we don’t have to guess. Zelensky has on many occasions. And he has maintained the only way the war can end is if Russia returns to Ukraine not just the four oblasts annexed in 2022, but also Crimea, and he also wants security guarantees which would amount to the effective integration of Ukraine into NATO.

This is a delusional position that guarantees never peace and a forever war. And forever war isn’t an abstract. It means forever death. Forever destruction. It means European societies becoming securitised and militarised, with the Russian foe a ready-made excuse for a Palantir-powered surveillance state. And this position rests atop a childish assertion repeated ad nauseum that grants the war its legitimacy: that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.”

Nothing is ever unprovoked. You can agree or disagree with whether the provocation warranted the reaction. But unprovoked is not an analysis, it is an emotional appeal, and in the case of Russia-Ukraine, it is propaganda designed to obscure the long history which led to Russia’s invasion.

It is, in many ways, not dissimilar to the propaganda that October 7th was an unprovoked attack on Israel. Or that Pearl Harbour was an unprovoked attack on the United States.

Narratives which strip out cause and effect and proclaim that a bad thing just happened without any preceding events, that good people were then drawn reluctantly into war to defend themselves against bad people, is the oldest trick in the war propaganda book designed to shut down critical intellectual inquiry.

So, briefly (for more detail read this by John Mearsheimer), the events preceding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine include a 1990 promise made by the US Secretary of State James Baker that if post-Soviet Russia allowed a unified Germany to remained in NATO, “NATO would not shift one inch eastward.” It was a promise made with an understanding that Russia was a legitimate country with legitimate security interests. That promise of course was repeatedly broken until NATO stretched to Russia’s borders. The preceding events also include the NATO-backed remilitarisation of Ukraine following the ousting of Victor Yanukovych in 2014, the Russian annexation of Crimea in response and Ukraine’s bombing of the Donbass which killed hundreds of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It includes an acute understanding among the Russian leadership that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed Ukraine to invade Russia itself.

You don’t have to think that Russia was right to invade Ukraine to try and understand why it invaded Ukraine, a consideration we are never prompted to investigate in a discourse dominated by normative moral judgements viewed exclusively through the lens of western imperialism. The shape of post-2014 Ukraine made Russia fearful that the country could once again be the launchpad for an invasion. And it wasn’t as if Putin hid this fact. He repeatedly warned, into late 2021 and early 2022, that the further militarisation of Ukraine was a red line and if Ukraine and the west refused diplomacy, Russia would act. He hadn’t been that bothered about Ukraine before 2014, there was no war talk, because it wasn’t the threat then that he perceived it became.

Again, this is not a defence of Putin, it is a question of cause and effect, and of the western arrogance and hubris that believes only its red lines on geostrategic issues are valid. Would the US have allowed a military alliance led by China to be built up through South America, reaching Mexico without a response? Would western media have dismissed American concerns about Chinese militarism as paranoid nonsense if Chinese military bases were dotted throughout South America? Of course not! The media would have demanded war and sold us war. But when the roles are reversed, American militarism becomes mere Russian paranoia.

And now the war that NATO expansionism threatened is not just here but is in danger of become a permanent fixture of our lives, with European economies embracing the bloodshed and building war economies. And to build these war economies, the liberal class is demanding more cuts to a welfare state already disseminated, in many places, by two decades of austerity. This week the Financial Times ran this article, demonstrating the brazenness with which anti-working class, hyper-capitalist, hyper-imperialist prescriptions are now presented as sensible opinion.

A “warfare state” all to fight a mythical Russia that, as Mearsheimer laid out in this video, didn’t invade Ukraine with anything like a force sufficient to conquer the country, but as a final gambit to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. Of course it failed. The liberal media and political class, however, continue to insist that Russia’s goal is full conquest, with more to follow, in order to legitimise the creation of war economies. That the liberal class would build a warfare state that decimates the welfare state to confront Russia, rather than seek diplomacy and partnership with a country which is home to huge volumes of minerals needed to build, for example, a cleaner energy system, is a demonstration of utter failure.

And who would these “warfare state” economies be powered by? In part, Israel, which has agreed a $4 billion deal with Greece to supply an air defence system, supplied a similar system to Germany for the same price last year, and handed over a half billion dollar missile system to Slovakia.

Israel is a part of the Ukraine-Russia war story in other very important ways, some of which now look decidedly self-defeating for Ukraine and Zelensky.

When the Iran war started, Zelensky enthusiastically embraced it and regurgitated all the classics, saying that the US-Israeli assault was a good thing because it would “rid the Iranian people of a terrorist regime.” In March, with the war on Iran raging, he urged Netanyahu to work with him, saying “he has what I need and I have what he needs.” But now Ukraine is out of interceptor missiles because they’ve all been used in the war on Iran, with Kiev defenceless against Russian missile attacks. Yesterday, every missile launched at Kiev hit its target, with zero interceptors launched. And now, after embracing the war on Iran, Zelensky is complaining about the lack of interceptors, a direct consequence of the war he supported. He hitched himself to empire, yet because of the over-stretching imperial adventurism he himself relies on, that empire has found itself unable to defend his country. It reveals a man who has no plan, beyond hoping that the weapons keep flowing.

Liberals appear reluctant to make the connection between the two imperial wars, preferring the dissonance that comes with an empire state of mind.

This dissonance has also been on display elsewhere, with pro-Ukraine war influencers demanding the west sends more weapons to Ukraine and incredulous at North Korea sending weapons to Russia, seemingly unable to follow their own logic on third-party countries sending weapons to principal conflict belligerents. Empire brains blinded to their own raging hypocrisy.

But as I’m writing, I can hear a criticism, and can even form one against myself. Why, Nate, when you are so morally strident on Israel and Palestine, are you decrying “normative moral judgements” on Ukraine and Russia?

Because the two situations could not be more different.

Ukraine is a state with a standing army supported by empire fighting another state with a standing army. Palestine has been denied statehood despite the 1947 UN two-state partition agreement (putting aside whatever one thinks about the legitimacy of that agreement), has no standing army to defend itself and Palestinians are fighting a colonial occupation armed by empire. If anything, Ukraine is far more similar to Israel than it is to Palestine. Indeed, in 2024 Zelensky proclaimed Israel as the ideal model for Ukraine, saying he wanted Ukraine to be a “big Israel.”

Both Ukraine and Israel are proxies at the tip of the imperial spear, one in Europe and one in the Middle East. You don’t have to be the invader to be a tool of imperialism. Sometimes being the invaded is more useful as it imparts a moral surety that helps shield your imperial role from critical analysis. I would argue this is exactly what has happened in the case of Ukraine.

None of this is to say I don’t have sympathy with ordinary Ukrainians. I do. I think they’ve been sold down the river, by both Europe and their own leaders, and have been coerced into fighting a war a majority now want to end with negotiations. The average Ukrainian is quite different to the average genocide-supporting Israeli who upholds apartheid.

Yet despite the wishes of a majority of Ukrainians, Europe and Zelensky refuse diplomacy and continue to fight, incurring enormous costs on Ukraine and ordinary Ukrainians. Of course, enormous costs are being inflicted on Russia too, but these costs have not been, and will not be sufficient for a “good peace.” And any costs that would really bite risk an uncontrolled, catastrophic escalation.

The final irony is that despite the war being marketed to westerners as totalitarianism versus democracy, Ukrainians can’t even elect a leader who would enact their wish to see a negotiated end to the war since Zelensky, whose term officially expired in 2024, introduced martial law and cancelled elections.

So, as I said, for better or worse, this is my perspective on Russia-Ukraine.

A war which advances only imperialist interests, interests which run counter to European security and prosperity. A war which threatens, at worst, to go nuclear. A war which wasn’t unprovoked. A war which, with their minds empty and hearts lacking true solidarity, consciousness or justice, has become a necessary intellectual organising principle for the liberal media and political class.

I’ve probably not made many fans, but I’d be delighted if I have.

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