The Loss of Integrity, Honour & Honesty in the Western Political Establishment.
The U.S. led West is in a moral crisis. A dearth of strong, honest leaders, a resurgent right-wing & a complete abdication of all moral responsibility and integrity, have left the West rudderless, internationally isolated and more detested than ever.
The tragic events this past ten days or so have left me in despair for the future of the human race. The economically dominant West is supplying the means, the weapons, and the diplomatic cover for a rabidly violent and vengeful Israel that is totally out of control and set on burning the Middle East to the ground to sate its’ own blood lust.
Obviously, we didn’t arrive here from nowhere; our collective moral degradation at the hands our supposed leaders has been long in the making, and Israel’s rampant escalation, and the cannonade of silence that has followed from Western leaders has overwhelmed and consumed me.
I need to say something. Yet, my voice is so small and so insignificant that the wretchedness I feel will not be salved by these words. All I can hope is that at least they will be added to the wave of popular revulsion at Israel’s leading the West by its guilt-laden nose into the crushing, inescapable gravity of the blackest of immoral black-holes to be consumed by our genocidal complicity, our revoltingly obtuse and continuous rubber stamping of Israel’s impunity, and the impotence of the rest of the world to do anything to stop this disastrous course of events.
Our leaders, such as they are, are either too weak, too corrupt, and/or lacking the moral spine to speak up in favour of what is right, correct and truly moral.
It made me think of a couple of scenes from a movie biopic, and how the words and actions of some of the real life characters are now from a bygone political era, and yet, they took place only a handful of years ago. I thought it might be constructive in some way to relate two brief scenes from the movie as being illustrative of the collapse of integrity, and the total abdication of moral backbone in our political communities that has become so disastrously visible since October 7, 2023.
The movie in question is The Report (2019), and it’s about the Senate investigation into CIA enhanced interrogation techniques during the War on Terror.
Okay, to qualify this; these are partial transcripts of two short scenes from the movie…so yes, it’s not real life; the first scene mentioned is probably written with a certain degree of theatrical licence, but the second, with Senator’s Dianne Feinstein and John McCain is a matter of official record and cannot be disputed.
Scene 1.
Dan Jones (Adam Driver) gets into a car in a darkened underground parking lot. Waiting for him is a New York Times reporter played by Matthew Rhys.
They sit in silence for twenty to thirty seconds before the reporter speaks.
Reporter: Did you ever meet a guy called Greg Craig?
DJ: Just in pas — White House counsel when Obama took office? (Reporter nods) Just in passing.
Reporter: So, right after he got elected the President asked Craig to come up with a plan to deal with the aftermath of the torture program. So, he got Secretary of Defense Gates, Janet Napolitana, Hillary Clinton — serious people — in a room, and he asked for their recommendations.
DJ: And?
Reporter: And…the consensus was that the President should appoint an independent bipartisan commission into interrogations and detainee treatment, like a deep dive into what worked, and what didn’t, and who was responsible. You know, like what they did after 9/11, and like what you have been trying to do.
DJ: So, why didn’t do they do that?
Reporter: Well, evidently the President listened closely to the recommendations. He then thought about it, and then he said ‘No.’ He’d spent an entire campaign saying he was the post-partisan President, so going after the Bush administration flew in the face of all that. And right then, everyone in that room changed their minds. They sided with the President; no independent commission. Everyone except Craig, because he thought it was too important. You couldn’t just torture people, lie about it, and then hide it from history. A few months later Craig was gone, and the mess wound up with the Senate. And you.
Scene 2. The Senate floor.
Senator Dianne Feinstein speaking to the Senate: Over the past six years, a small team of investigators pored over more than 6.3 million pages of CIA records to complete this report. It shows the CIA’s actions a decade ago are a stain on our values and on our history. The release of this 500 page summary cannot remove that stain, but it can and does say to our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it’s wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes. Releasing this report is an important step toward restoring our values and showing the world that we are, in fact, a just and lawful society…//…(But) history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face the ugly truth and say ‘never again.’
Senator John McCain: What might come as a surprise is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 cuplrits to justice and to find and prevent attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise, since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in private, that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism. I think it’s an insult to the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence without hurting or degrading prisoners to assert that we can’t win this war without such methods. Yes, we can, and we will! But, in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are, and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world. Our enemies act without conscience. We must not.
Okay, so you might ask, what’s this about?
Well, as John McCain might say, it’s about how we represent ourselves to the world. It’s about ‘who we are,’ and ‘who we aspire to be.’ And by ‘we,’ in this context, I mean Americans first and foremost, yes, but more widely the West.
None of us are blind to the suffering being inflicted by Israel on the people of Palestine, and, as of this week, once again onto the people of Lebanon. I’m not here, in this context, to argue the legalities of the case for and against these truly revolting attacks, suffice to say that this is being conducted under the pretext of Israeli self-defence.
And yet, with respect to the Palestinians, the Israelis are illegally occupying the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza which, under international law, negates their right to self-defence (see here for a larger discussion on this). In other words, there is no right under international law for Israel, or their supporters, to claim self defence. These are facts, and they are indisputable.
In Lebanon, Israel’s brutal, indiscriminate attacks this week that have resulted in the death of Hassan Nasrullah at the expense of many hundreds of dead innocents, that Biden callously says provides a ‘measure of justice’ for Hezbollah’s American victims over the years. So, by that measure, will the death of many more Americans provide the measure of justice for the hundreds of dead Lebanese women, children and civilians, civilians killed I might add, with US tax payer funded bombs, allegedly sent to Israel for their self defence? And in that case, when and where does it all stop?
I mean how does the need for self-defence warrant or justify this slaughter or that in Gaza? It can only be because those big, rough tough, well trained, well armed Israeli soldiers are so endangered and threatened by little Lebanese and Palestinian kids and unarmed women that vaporising them would seem to be the only way of securing Israel’s border and future security. And plainly, in American and Israeli minds this twisted sense of reality and justice makes perfect reading.
And yet, it’s Hezbollah who are the designated terrorists!
Hezbollah’s actions, and those of the Houthi’s, since October 10 are not unprovoked. They are provoked, and provoked in the most horrific way, by Israel’s own genocidal actions in Gaza and the West Bank. This totally unnecessary escalation is indicative of one thing, and one thing only; Israel’s desire to drag the U.S. into a wider Middle Eastern war as a means to settle its own vengeful scores against the enemies it has created for itself with over more than eight decades of Palestinian murders, deaths, dispossessions, evictions, and human rights denials.
Of course, it’s easy to say both Hezbollah and the Houthi’s are taking advantage of the situation to attack Israel — I am not privy to their closed door conversations — so, yes, maybe they are making political hay. But not to the same degree as Netanyahu, who is using the horrific murders of many of his own people to further his own political career and personal aims.
The Houthi’s and Hezbollah are only doing what all nations should be doing in the event that a state sponsored genocide is being committed; they are standing up for the victims. And yes, maybe there is a certain degree of political oneupmanship or promotion in that decision, but at least the end result is morally in line with international law. Not something that can be said for Israeli actions, or those of its cold, calculating, utterly wanton leader.
Look…I do not deny Israel’s right to exist, or Jews right to live in peace and security. What I do deny is Israel’s claim to land that is not theirs, was never designated to be theirs, and the death and destruction they bring, by choice, to the people of Palestine and the wider Middle East in the process of stealing that land.
Hezbollah have made it perfectly clear on any number of occasions that if Israel stops its genocide they will stop firing rockets into Israel. That is not a complicated equation to resolve.
Netanyahu’s assertions that Israeli’s displaced from their villages in the north of Israel can only be returned to their homes by military action is a blatant falsehood, and is wholly indicative of the prime minister’s blood lust and war-mongering nature that serves only his own personal ends and political ambitions. A wider war will not make Israeli’s safer or more secure. It will only succeed in making more enemies and making Israel less secure over a far longer period.
If Israeli’s want to live peaceful, secure lives then they have to stop what they’re doing. Dismantle the settlements, end the occupation, move back behind the green line, and pay reparations. Nothing else will guarantee their safety more than taking those actions.
Basically, give back what they stole, pay damages, and fucking apologise! Profusely! Again, not a super complicated equation, unless you want to complicate with false claims of ownership based on a book that no one else in the Middle East believes in. Pride should play no part in this. To be safe, secure, and hopefully happy, these are the steps. Period.
And then we come to the West’s guilt-laden, yet hopelessly misguided support of, and complicity in, Israel’s plausible genocide; the billions and billions of dollars of bombs, arms and other weapons, and what is now known to be, America’s disgustingly blatant complicity in the starvation of Palestinians and the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The news that U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, knew that the U.S. Agency for International Development, among other agencies, had determined that Israel had broken both international and U.S. laws in deliberately restricting aid into Gaza, was shocking to say the least. He then deliberately chose to lie to Congress about this saying, ‘we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting’ the delivery of aid.
I’m not sure how many laws this so-called diplomat has broken, but it’s a few, and yet, not one word of censure; not one threat of prosecution has been mentioned. Merely a diplomatic shrug of the shoulders indicating that the breaking of multiple U.S. and international laws is just the cost of killing brown faced Muslims in the Middle East.
Yeh, anyway, America has been doing this for decades now, so it’s just business as usual, isn’t it?
The law? Just for those who are not on our side apparently. And, one presumes then, that today, this is what passes for a ‘just and lawful society’ in America!
But, to paraphrase John McCain; is this really ‘who we are?’ Or ‘who we aspire to be?’ Is this ‘how we wish to represent ourselves to the world?’ Is this acting with, or without, conscience? Is this ‘facing the ugly truth’ and showing our ‘commitment to a just society governed by law?’ Is this really about us saying ‘never again,’ but only once all the Palestinians have been murdered and Lebanon has been bombed back to the Stone Age? Is this really who we are?
And then the final words from the scenes above — ‘Never again.’ Of course this phrase is perhaps most infamous as the refrain against committing genocide again after the Shoah. In this context it was perhaps to indicate the collapse of American values, morals and standards.
Well, by any measure, in both instances the words and the intention behind ‘never again’ have been woefully, deplorably, disgustingly betrayed. And I feel with every breath I take, the gravity of that betrayal in the most personal way.
I am thoroughly ashamed of our elected leaders, and their collective weakness, impotence, and incompetence. And to be clear, I’m not holding up John McCain or Dianne Feinstein as being some sort of God-like Svengali’s who could do no wrong. Far from it — I didn’t agree with McCain’s politics, but he was a man I respected because he spoke his mind, he was honest and had integrity, and could be relied upon to do what he thought was morally correct regardless of party politics. And that is a rarity. I digress…
Perhaps the NYT headline this weekend: ‘Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War,’ says more about where the West is than I ever could from my heart-broken perspective.
The author, Roger Cohen, eager to shift the onus for the burgeoning death toll away from Israel and America, and onto what he describes as a crumbling Middle East, and the abdication of China from the peace process, the immensity of the Palestinian dead he labours to tell us, using Biden’s parsimonious words, is merely an ‘over the top’ reaction by Israel.
That’s it? Forty two thousand dead is ‘over the top.’ Oh! You think? A touch too much hyperbole perhaps?
And then, in what I imagine to be a pathetically, weak whisper, further debilitated by his obvious bias, he tell us that while the ‘United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Biden,’ ‘…an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms.’
And the worst of it is, that there isn’t a lie or mistruth in there. America will never cut off the flow of arms, not because of the shared values, but because they make too much damn money from the sale of those arms, and that’s without the billions of campaign dollars AIPAC pours into politicians pockets on both sides of the aisle.
But what irks me the most is what Cohen calls the ‘shared values of two democracies’…and I’m like, you really want to go there? Two democracies indeed — if it wasn’t so tragic it would almost be funny!
But first, does America really want to share values with a nation that is plausibly committing a genocide, has arrest warrants for multiple breaches of international law hanging over its morally bereft leader, and a nation that has been illegally occupying and settling land that is not theirs for almost six decades?
And then, on the question of democracies; Israel isn’t close to being a democracy, nor has it ever been close; and that’s without mentioning the many, many democratic infringements of America itself that falsely claims the mantle of the worlds oldest democracy, even though it has really only became a democratic state in 1965. And has since that time fought to reduce, hobble, prevent, and gerrymander it’s way out of giving minority citizens their legal right to vote, and all in a bid to prop up a racial caste system, hundreds of years old (1), built on the back of a much revered, yet highly anti-democratic Constitution that shackles the American people to a system that perpetuates socio-economic inequalities and calls into question America’s claim to have ever been a democracy (2).
Is this really who we are in the U.S. led West now? Is this really the blood-soaked label Americans want to pin their chests? Or is this another illustration of just how dirty, just how how stained and tarnished our politics has become? Is that really a good enough excuse? Poor John McCain must be turning in his patriots grave.
Or is something much darker at work here? Something too ugly to face up to? Something, and I hesitate to say this because it is so hard to comprehend; something more ugly than the Bush administrations torture program?
So, in turning our back, and closing our already blinded eyes, we set about ignoring the blood, ignoring the soaring numbers of dead, ignoring the global denunciations, to take refuge in an ever shrinking camp of moralising righteousness painted and detailed so well by Roger Cohen, and tell ourselves that we are doing all we can; that if the people are going to fight they’re going to fight, what can we do to stop it? When all the time the simple truth is staring us in the face; if we stop giving Israel the weapons the murders will stop.
But that simple truth is just far too ugly to face up to; it’s just too damn costly in so many ways to ever admit to it. It’s far easier just to let the condemned die, wave a few plaintive platitudes over the mass graves, utter a few concerned Amen’s and tell the world we did all we could, but it just wasn’t enough, and that we must do better next time.
Then we can begin anew, and seek out the next economically deprived region or people to bomb and kill and maim and make money off in the name of Western morality, righteousness, the need to maintain the rules based international order, and the promotion of Western values.
After all, for those of us who don’t see violence as the solution to the world’s problems, we can no longer rely on diplomacy to sort out the world’s squabbles. The UN is impotent, and unable to break the founding monopoly that favours the big five at the expense of the rest of the world.
And anyway, there are so few diplomatic men or women of honour today; there are merely partisan hacks, power hungry blobs of translucent jello, who follow the party line irrespective of puerile insignificancies such as moral correctness, the truth, and facts as they are, and not how we would wish them to be. Always with one eye on potential endorsements, book deals and any financial benefits they can garner with their tainted words and actions, and another on their blossoming career path, today’s Western diplomats in particular are merely political prostitutes, always available, but only to the highest bidders. Doing, or saying the right thing just because it is the right thing to do, even if it goes against party policy or the voice of the majority, died in large part with men like John McCain, along with any sense of truth, or honour, or service.
To be non-partisan, equal, fair and honest these days is to be a traitor; vilified, berated as weak-minded, indecisive, underhand, and ill-informed, and we are all the worse for it. Political divides now break up families, cleave communities, and destroy societies, despite those who actually drive the divide telling us their policies would do just the opposite, and bring us together.
But then, hey! What’s one more teeny weeny little ol’ white lie anyway?
Thanks for reading.
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent; Isabel Wilkerson, 2020.
- The Constitutional Bind: How America Came to Idolize A Document that Fails Them; Aziz Rana, 2024.
