Star Wars Redux?

Tags

China, death-star, paul william roberts, putin, Russia, satellites, Space Force, space law, Trump ignorance, United Nations, weaponization of space

Last week, amid the outcry against grotesque in humanity at the Mexican border, President Trump – how those two words still sit so uneasily together, so incongruously! – ordered the Department of Defence and the Pentagon to create a sixth branch of the US Military he called Space Force. Its purpose? To make America great again beyond the ionosphere, out there in the universe. Another branch of the military? It does sound like the weaponization of space, doesn’t it? Well, a very clever East Indian fellow, whose name old age currently prevents from recalling, drafted the International Law governing outer space, and among the many clauses in this law, approved by the UN, is the prohibition of weapons there. It also declares all off-world bodies, moons, asteroids, planets, international territory, whose resources, if any, belong to the world as a whole. This may sound chauvinistic to any Venusians or Martians looking on, but from our point of view it certifies the solar system, the galaxy, and indeed everything else, as the communal property of our planet, the one presumed to be discovering everything. It’s not unreasonable, and won’t be until someone else comes along. Possibly no one has told Trump, and you can be certain he’s never read about it himself, that the Reagan-era Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, was in fact a sham designed to spook the erstwhile Soviet Union into throwing in the towel. That and an undermining of the economy by means of luring them into Afghanistan actually worked. The Soviet Union was bankrupted by trying to keep up with American financial exceptionalism, and the glorious age of Putin was born. Star Wars was a theoretical system of “death-star” satellites capable of shooting any incoming hostile missiles out of the middle air long before they reached America. Digital videos of the whole kit and caboodle looked very sci-fi and effective, as satellites zapped away at incoming threats left, right and centre, the lasers terminating old-fashioned missiles the way they do in video games. The trouble was that this in itself was a video game. The Pentagon of course never bothered to announce that the SDI was indeed a marvellous idea, but also one so expensive that the entire world together couldn’t afford it. Better dead than bankrupt was the message. But Russia and China believed SDI was in the works, and, unsurprisingly, thirty years later both of America’s eternal foes have rather pitiful versions of “death-star” satellites that can, or sometimes can in publicized tests, zap the satellites that pry into secretive doings on their stretches of earth or threaten their own wastelands of space junk. You can’t have this coercion going on, can you? Ergo: Space Force.

 

Let us theoretically posit that the UN’s Security Council is a monstrous aberration that negates the purpose of the entire rather useless organization. It’s just an hypothesis. So why is it that members of this Security Council always include Russia, China and America, with lesser, very grateful nations given a brief peek at what the big boys do? And what those big boys do – let’s call them RAC – is whatever the fuck they like. If criticized at all, it is by fellow big boys. All three of them have now broken space law, and who is calling for punitive measures? Perhaps no one? At least the international outrage is so muted that this latest American response – always belligerent – is… Space Force, war in outer space, more shame for this planet, if that is anyone else is watching. No outcry so far, no gnashing of UN teeth, probably because 95 percent of the planet views space exploration in much the same way as it views immortality. Yet for the rest of us the weaponization of space is very real, and a very real threat on the same level as the race for atomic weapons. The testing of “death-star” satellites way up there in the endless night will have unpredictable effects down here, from the disruption of telecommunications and data storage systems to the ever-more-likely event of space junk, a few tons of scrap metal, hurtling down to land in your kiddie park or wherever. The consequences of an actual shooting war up there are unthinkable.

 

Yet there he is, Space-Admiral Trump, the uniform tight, muscle-defining, as he salutes another platoon of space warriors on their way to do battle with Darth Putin’s scaly scum or the Beijingons. And no one objects? And no one points out that this is in fact illegal? Let the facts be facts, and life the thing it can, by all means, but don’t see yourselves as innocent bystanders when you can’t be bothered to rebel against monstrosity when it rears up on your watch. If we aren’t prepared to die for certain principles we have no principles at all.

The G6-Plus-One Summit

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decline of US, democracy-tyranny, free-speech, G7 summit, paul william roberts, Plato, police state, scorn for America, state violence, trade war, Trump character, Trump ignorance, Trump stupidity, Trumps insults

 

A state that has to protect itself with military from its own citizens is, in Plato’s terms, a state sliding down the slippery slope from democracy to tyranny. This is what happened over the last few days at the summit of western industrial nations here in Quebec. Police outnumbered demonstrators. They may have been called “police” but for all intents and purposes they were the government’s private army – in fact their actual function at all times – in full riot gear, with shields, staves, guns with real and rubber bullets, flak-vests, and tear-gas launchers. It is a worrying spectacle to hear of a police force, allegedly existent “to serve and protect”, clad to do battle with those they’re supposed to be serving and protecting. Worrying too is the news that most demonstrators stayed away because of the massive and unwarranted police presence. This is not what a free society is all about, and it has been dismaying to watch as freedoms have been gradually given up, supposedly in the interests of public safety. As was said by wiser lips, “Those who would give up freedom for a little security deserve neither freedom nor security.” And the cost of this police-state jamboree? $600 million, we’re told. But with this cash-happy Liberal Government, no doubt it will eventually top a billion Considering the G7 debacle in Toronto several years ago, when hundreds of demonstrators were wrongfully arrested, also at an immense cost, why should taxpayers be expected to foot such inordinately steep bills? Who cares where western industrial dignitaries have their pointlessly inconclusive meetings, meetings their so-called “Sherpas” – insulting to the real Sherpas – basically have for them in advance anyway? Let them take place on a private island somewhere, with a few boats as the security.

 

One thing we know about Donald Trump – perhaps the only thing we know for sure – is that he’s no gentleman. One of the privileges, probably one of the few, accorded to the mayor of the small town where this summit was held was the right to personally greet arriving world leaders, no doubt for a photo-op. But not Trump. Oh, no. He was far too grand and important to handy-dandy with so lowly an official. He arrived late and cut his visit short too. How obnoxiously insulting to the leaders of the only countries America can really rely on as allies! The man is so far beneath contempt his head or arse must be poking out in Australia, and his contempt for his peers is pushing the US ever further into the backwater it’s destined to occupy for the rest of history unless policies and attitudes change. It’s not such a powerhouse anymore. The leaders themselves have been calling the erstwhile G7 the G6-Plus-One for some time now, with the US pulling out of or refusing to sign mainly climate accords. If this goes on, it will just be the G6, and as such can still competently lead the western industrial world without Washington. We know from Trump’s disastrous lack of success in business ventures over the past couple of decades – only Russian banks would lend him money to continue – that business is not his forte. Marketing is that. But to hear him at the summit declaring that Russia should be present as a member was rich beyond belief. In fact Russia was kicked out of what was then a G8 when Putin invaded Crimea and attacked the Ukraine. They won’t be allowed back either, or not until they reform their policies. America may well be heading in the same direction. Trump’s lack of business acumen, manifest in his trade tariffs, and his unwillingness to read reports or to be advised, clearly prevents him from knowing that the Great Depression wasn’t caused by a stock market crash – the only disaster he seems to comprehend. It was caused by a trade war, the kind of war he imagines is easily won. In your dreams, scumbag, in your fetid dreams.

 

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

 

How To Respond

Tags

amnesia, apocalypse, decline of America, democracy, economic meltdown, globalism, greed, oligarchy, paul william roberts, Plato, sanctions, Socrates, tariffs, the Republic, timocract, trump, tyranny, Venezuela

The preeminent German news magazine Der Spiegel  is suggesting that we cancel the G-7 meeting to be held soon here in Quebec. Why pretend cooperation with Trump, they say, when he makes enemies of his allies? The meeting won’t be cancelled, for dialogue must go on or else all is lost. But I think it marks the beginning of an isolation that America will regret in years to come, as she slides into global irrelevance. In his Republic, Plato has Socrates define four types of unjust governments into which decaying societies successively fall on their way down: timocracy, which is the rule of spirited big property-owners, oligarchy, democracy, which to him deteriorates into mob rule, and tyranny, where the demagogue is inclined to start wars and other conflicts to bolster up his image as a leader. From our perspective, it seems muddled, for democracy must surely precede oligarchy? But the schemata is otherwise intact and sound enough, with only our contemporary notions of democracy at odds with the contention. The demagogue, says Plato, exploits a fear of oligarchy by the masses to establish his tyranny. He uses his power to root out whatever decent elements that remain in a society, leaving only the worst elements in key positions. It seems familiar, or it does south of the border. The whole sequence, conceived 2,300 years ago, can still be usefully applied to the gradual decadence of many if not most states. But what does it say of Canada’s continued, if reluctant, compliance with Washington?

 

Gore Vidal called his country the United States of Amnesia. They forget, they forget. But we forget too. We forget that not so many years ago Venezuela was being hailed as a new oil superpower, an oil-rich country set to wallow in riches from the earth the way the Saudis have been doing. Now Venezuela is a nation on the verge of disintegration, whereas under the socialist Hugo Chavez it could cock a snook at the behemoth to its north. What happened? Well, the US pushed its weight around at the UN and sanctions were imposed on the sale of Venezuelan oil, sending the economy into a tailspin. Sanctions are always imposed on countries said to hate their own people. But the sanctions merely reveal those who impose them also to hate that nation’s people, for sanctions have little effect on ruling elites, only devastating the masses. Canada, which has now cut Venezuelan visas by fifty percent, has had little to say about this criminal travesty. Why? Because Canadian oil prices benefit from the embargo on Venezuelan oil, as do US oil prices, and for that matter Russian oil prices and everyone else’s oil prices, except of course Iran’s, which are also under sanction, a sanction Trump is eager to keep in place. If one country is to emerge as decent and progressive in all of this, it will be the one whose leader is honest and courageous enough to say, “Enough of this! We want, and will have, a world free of greed and hypocrisy, a world where goodness alone produces truth,” as Socrates tells us can be the case with objects of knowledge, just as the Sun’s light enables us to see the objects of perception in the world.