Our forever wars have driven us mad. So mad that I find myself recalling the 1978 mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana, of the People’s Temple cult. This group took root in the progressive communities of Oakland, San Francisco, and many other California communities back in the 1970s. I heard whispering about how great it was and how so many leftists of all colors and persuasions were attending its events. Then somehow its leader, Jim Jones, a guy from Indiana, inspired hundreds of good progressive people to move with him to the jungles of South America to take up an ideal life, also known as apostolic socialism. Jones, who was reported to love Stalin and Mao, had put together a toxic brew combining personality cult, religion and politics. It came to an abrupt end when over 900 people swallowed poisoned cool aid and died in the hot sun of their tropical paradise. Jones shot himself. The images of their swollen bodies laying around in the sun in the aftermath of it all have haunted me and many others all these years since. These images have now all but disappeared from the internet.
Back then, I had a sneaking suspicion that this was not just an aberration. It was something that had great significance for the future. I did not know how or even if it was true. But today, witnessing the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, it occurs to me that the same forces are back at work. The spectacle of Zionist Jews practicing genocide against Palestinians exactly as it was inflicted on them by the Germans in WWII is just mind-blowingly unbelievable. Polls show that the vast majority of Israelis believe that killing Palestinians is just fine. No problem killing babies and women, bombing whole cities to rubble, murdering peace negotiators and revered religious leaders, and using bull dozers to obliterate everything. And it’s not just Israelis. The neocons of the west, the US and Europe, are running around saying Palestinians do not exist! That killing them off is “self defense.” The toxic combination of personality cult (Trump), religion (Zionism), and politics (American hegemony) has now infected vastly more people than Jim Jones ever did. It doesn’t seem to matter if the politics are left, right, or center. Committing to one’s faith while taking leave of one’s senses is a recipe for disaster.
Believing in an absurdly misinformed ideology has now led to the corruption of global institutions that rule modern western societies and its vassal states. Neocon insanity shows itself in things like blowing up the Russian/German gas pipeline that basically brought the whole German industrial machine to its knees, where it now kisses the ass of American LNG producers. The insanity shows itself in the NATO and CIA embrace of the Nazi Bandera fascists who lead the absurd war in Ukraine, forcing half Ukraine’s population to flee the country and over a million patriotic young soldiers to die an early horrible death. Jones only killed 918. European and American neocons are shouting ‘fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian.’ Add Russo-phobia and Zionism on top of neoconservative politics and there you have it. Loney tunes playing over every station.
I don’t know exactly what caused Jim Jones and his People’s Temple to drink the cool aid. But it is clear what is bringing the neocon’s deadly concoction of ideology, religion and politics into collision with its end. It is Iran and Russia backed by the People’s Republic of China. The neocons have met their match and are losing it, descending into madness. They are pushing the western world towards self destruction in a way so similar to the People’s Temple that I cannot help thinking that they are now stocking up with Cool Aid and strychnine. They have adopted a fundamentally flawed ideology and put it up against the entire planet. It has led to their defeat and to the total isolation of Israel and the US, along with its European vassals. They are cornered and panic is spreading through the capitols of western civilization. It is not hard to imagine western civilization deciding to nuke the entire planet rather than admitting defeat. Nuclear bombs are their cool aid.
All of this is taking place inside a world shaped by the old colonial (now neocolonial) system. The “garden countries” of western civilization are shrinking like punctured balloons in the face of the Global South’s departure from the grip of its tentacles. The heart of the problem for our dying ruling class is China. China took her leave from the 100 years of humiliation, from the poverty and exploitation imposed upon it by western conquest. That was the first step in gradually reducing the flow of super profits from the global south that had nourished western civilizations for 500 years. Like a drug addict deprived of his fix, the west began to lose its mind. And it just keeps getting worse and worse as the neocons lose war after war, as the world flocks into alternative payment systems, as the almighty dollar sinks into the sunset. Nothing has demonstrated this process of decline more clearly than the crisis created when the Iranians shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
The flow of oil into modern economies is what makes the empire function. When it stopped flowing, eyes popped at the sight of the abyss faced globally. Everything runs off diesel so the supply chains of the economy faced an abrupt halt. Fertilizers derived from oil underlay the food system of every country. Mass starvation looms. Jet fuel ran short. All of a sudden it became clear that the modern system of production and distribution are nothing without the fossil fuels that power everything. Fossil fuels may be a dying source of power for the future, but right now it is the main thing keeping the “modern world” running. Threatening its supply lines threatens not only the lives of millions, even billions, of people. It also threatens ruling class power. The system has run into a wall, just like Jim Jones and his trusting band of followers all those years ago.
Perhaps the most telling sign of this insanity occurred in the 1970s when the western war machine decided to outsource its weapons supply chains to China, its enemy. Deng Xiaoping, the ruler of the People’s Republic of China and its Communist Party at the time, invited them in with a smile. The neocons figured that all the money being invested in China would certainly result in regime change and keep their outsourced supply chains safe. But they were wrong, deluded by their own hubris and ignorance. Now China, still under the rule of the Communist Party of China, cut off the supply of rare earth minerals and the west’s war machine silently grinds to a halt. F-35 warplanes are being delivered to the Air Force with no radar because they cannot make the radar without the rare earths. Missiles are being shot off faster than the west can replace them because the west no longer has the manufacturing base it outsourced to China. At the same time that the alleged missile defense systems are being exposed as inadequate and way too expensive, the west has torn up every single nuclear arms treaty we ever had. At the same time that the west has lost every war it instigated since WW2, it has failed to sign a single peace treaty with anyone. Trump’s Memorandum Of Understanding with Iran has made the Israelis and the neocons apoplectic with rage and panic. What about our forever wars?!! Western politicians and press are now so caught up in their lies that they no longer know what is happening around them. Maybe they should add straight jackets to their shopping list of cool aid and strychnine. I am sure they can find plenty of willing helpers to dig all the bunkers they need to retreat to in their final reckoning with the truth, which will surely come to them, just as it did to Jim Jones and his People’s Temple. And just as it did to Adolph Hitler.