I have been, and am still, stunned by the sadism of the Israeli government and its military — as well as by the US, UK, and German governments’ enthusiastic endorsement of genocide. Good heavens, what a bunch of psychopaths makes up the top echelons of our western societies! The events in Gaza recently prompted Craig Murray to write that he had now understood that his “belief in some kind of inherent decency in the Western political Establishment was naive.”

Bush was once the laughing stock of the world when he ranted about the potentially “nukiller” country, Iran’s, being part of “the axis of evil”. I’m afraid I’m tempted to backslide to that particular Bushism. No adjectives in any dictionary I know of can adequately describe the depravity of the acts being carried out in Gaza with energetic western support.

Meanwhile, however, many other issues go unheeded. Take for instance the current troubles in Haiti, a failed state since the USA finally broke that country’s back in 2004.

The extraordinary idea nurtured by successive US governments that they may – indeed must – play the role of Global Top Gun is absolutely mind-boggling. The oddest thing of all is that most citizens in NATO countries don’t seem to mind. Not for nothing are US citizens taught the US catechism: “We are the biggest and the best.” Not for nothing have the rest of us been force-fed Hollywood films night after night, decade after decade.

Most US Americans don’t know, of course, what damage their country wrecks everywhere it goes, and are therefore completely innocent, because corporate media is not “free” to tell them. Nor is the UK mainstream media (MSM) free to tell its citizens. Or the Norwegian MSM, for that matter. There are, admittedly, a few independent sources of journalism, but we are instructed to consider them Russian propaganda outlets and their journalists are – we are told – conspiracy theorists.

So aggressively opposed are our governments to freedom of information, that they are even willing to dismantle fundamental principles of Democracy (with, e.g., the Patriot Act in the US and, in the UK, the National Security Act of 2023 and the updated Official Secrets Act.) Moreover, the Julian Assange case illustrates just how far the UK is willing to go in order to block exposure of UK/US crimes against their own and other countries’ citizens. His case is, from a legal point of view, a travesty of the British legal system, which turns out to be no more committed to justice than judiciaries in countries with which Western countries do not care to be likened.

On Friday last, the new Workers Party of Britain won a resounding electoral victory in a by-election in Rochester. Quoth George Galloway, a politician who stands up to the ignominious leadership of the Labour Party (and you will find his words all over Google): “Keir Starmer – This is for Gaza!“

So that was the good news, not that the dying people of Gaza will know of it, I’m afraid.

The bad news is that Galloway’s party, which could in theory rally quite a large proportion of badly deceived British voters, will be hounded by the MSM and government spokespersons and will be the butt of ceaseless defamation campaigns, the first of which started the moment his victory was announced.

As for Haiti, the US is not the only country to have defiled what must once have been a land of milk and honey. The French economist Thomas Piketty writes in Chapter 6 of Capitalism and Ideology about the blood money exacted by the French Government from its former Haitian slaves between 1849 and 1915, after which the “debt” was taken over by the USA which occupied (and virtually again enslaved) Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and continued to demand payment from its victims until 1950! (My translation of the titles of the two relevant sections in Piketty’s book is France: the double abolition of 1794-1848 and Haiti: When slavery is converted into public debt,) They explain the background of Haitian demands towards the French government.

Actually, you don’t have to read those two sections (though I do recommend that you read the entire book), but you really should read the excellent article in Responsible Statecraft: “From coup to chaos: 20 years after the US ousted Haiti’s president”. It explains how the US with its visceral loathing of Articles 25 and 26 in the Declaration of Humans Rights plotted and organised the demise of the extremely popular and democratically elected Aristide.

In the article you will also find a link to the story of how the Haitian slaves heroically defeated and drove away their French owners and how they, the former slaves, subsequently had to pay the former owners (and later also the USA) compensation for loss of property, i.e. them – the former slaves.

For many countries all over the planet, the USA has been and is still the serpent in Paradise (I’m expanding on the above referenced Bushism). USA does believe in some human rights, such as the right to chose between Scylla and Charybdis during elections, provided, of course, the voters chose the candidate previously groomed for them by the USA (e.g. Guaido in Venezuela). This last proviso does not, admittedly, apply to NATO countries (on which the USA occasionally has to rely for its nefarious military operations all over the planet, currently off the coast of Yemen). USA also believes in the right to carry a gun, though I’m uncertain as to where in the Declaration of Human Rights that right is enshrined.

So you see, there has never really been any reason to suspect the upper echelons of society of even a sliver of what Craig Murray calls “decency”. We have just been docilely led by the nose.