The centre cannot hold ...
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned ...
I’ve been struggling for months now to try and articulate the chaos we’re all descending into, or, perhaps more accurately, we’re all being dragged into by our deranged and despotic ruling class. I’ve tried to put what’s happening into words over and over again but I’ve been unable to encompass not only the horror of it but also the sheer lunacy of it. The batshit craziness of it. Every time I’ve sat myself down to write - because I feel I must write in order to make sense of it, in order to retain some semblance of sanity - nothing would come, it was all just buzzing, blooming confusion.1
Until one day, sitting in front of a blank screen, all my paid and unpaid work done for the day, the phrase ‘the centre cannot hold’ popped into my head. It’s a very famous line from a very, very famous poem, perhaps one of the most well-known poems in the English language - The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats.
I’m not the first to find resonances with my own times in this poem and no doubt I will not be the last, but to say this poem is a terrifyingly accurate depiction of the era we’re all living through right now is an understatement. Yeats wrote it in 1919, a year after the “Great War” ended and the Irish War of Independence began. A year when the world was still in the grip of the worst pandemic since the Black Death2, and, perhaps most significantly for Yeats, a year where the whole world was grappling with the realisation they’d all just sent the fat end of an entire generation of young men to die terrible deaths for no good reason.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold …
Yeats believed that history moved in an expanding and contracting spiral (which he referred to as a gyre) and in The Second Coming he describes the moment when the current historical ‘gyre’ (for Yeats, the epoch that has lasted since the birth of Christ) begins to give way to a new and more chaotic epoch. What we are currently experiencing is - without a shadow of a doubt - a period where one ‘gyre’ to use Yeats’ terminology, gives way to another.
The ‘gyre’ that drawing to its end right now is the time period within which the group of countries collectively known as ‘the West’3 dominated the globe. Many analysts suggest that the current global hegemon and self-appointed ‘leader of the free world, the United States, is on the way out and it is looking increasingly likely that as the American empire declines and eventually falls it may take the entire ‘West’ (the group of Western European countries and their settler colonies that have dominated the world for centuries) with it. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It could turn out to be the best thing that has happened to humanity for a long time but only if the U.S. and its crazy friends don’t destroy the entire planet and everything on it in the process.
Even if some of us do manage to survive the demise of Western hegemony, the transition is definitely not going to be an easy one. Despite the obvious decline of the West, economically, culturally and technologically, the bloated military budget of the United States ensures that those currently holding the reins of power won’t release them without an almighty fight. And so we find ourselves, in Yeats’ words, ‘turning and turning in the widening gyre’. And not only can the falcon not hear the falconer4, the falconer has gone stark staring mad, with leaders all over the Western world dropping the liberal-democratic masks they’ve all worn for so long and revealing themselves to be monsters.
And once the mask starts to slip it becomes more and more obvious that we are all, to utilise a well-worn but appropriate phrase, off to hell in a handcart - things fall apart and the centre cannot hold. International law, domestic law, ‘democracy’, indeed the entire Western political system is being destroyed before our eyes by the leaders we elected to represent us. None of these things were ever really what they seemed but for a long-ish while those of us fortunate enough to live in ‘the West’, and fortunate enough to be in a position of relative economic comfort within Western society, didn’t realise that.
The imperialist, colonialist, capitalist system we fondly call ‘Western liberal democracy’ or ‘the First World’, has always been a horror show for those on the receiving end of its exploitative barbarism - places like Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South and Central America. Recently, however, its started to show it’s true colours even to those of us who reside in the imperial core and in the vassal states that cleave to that core like chicks clustering under their mother’s wings.
It used to be possible, by clinging firmly to your middle-class job, keeping your mouth zipped and sticking firmly to mainstream media for your news about the world, to pretend that things are all fine and dandy with ‘the Free World’ but lately it’s becoming much more difficult. Minorities and those at the bottom of the economic heap in the West were the first to feel the pain, a pain which was dialled up to searing agony with the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 90s. This plunge into ‘neoliberalism’ led to a massive leap in inequality with wealth concentrating upwards so fast and so hard it seriously challenged not just the so-called “Gilded Age” of the late 19th - early 20th Centuries but it even began giving the period just before the French Revolution a run for its money.
As noted in a famous quote attributed to Frank Zappa
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.
Comfortable Westerners never realised there was a brick wall at the back of the theatre (a brick wall non-Westerners and Westerners ‘outside the theatre’ always knew was there) because it was, until relatively recently, ‘profitable to continue the illusion’. A complex concatenation of factors has led us to the point where it is no longer profitable. That, in a nutshell, is where we are right now.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned
Five years ago most Westerners - sorry, most comfortably off Westerners - couldn’t even imagine the number, and the magnitude, of the horrors that are unfolding across the world as we near the end of the year 2025.
In Gaza - as every well-known human rights organisation including Israeli organisations like B’tselem and even the United Nations itself have attested - we’ve all been witnessing a genocide live-streamed through our phones every day for the last two years. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have died - either directly from Israel’s bombs and bullets, or indirectly via hunger, lack of clean water and lack of medical facilities and supplies.
Trump and Netanyahu and their Western political and media lackeys are now claiming there is a ‘ceasefire’ but Israel has not stopped killing people in Gaza for one single day since the agreement was signed and has let in only a fraction of the agreed-upon aid. Anyone who still persists in calling this a ceasefire is either deranged, or flat-out lying.
It has been estimated that Israel has broken the ‘ceasefire’ over 500 times since it began and it has killed at least 356 Palestinians and injured 909, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Just the other day Israel killed two little boys out collecting firewood for their disabled father. The IDF claimed they were ‘carrying out suspicious activities’ and posed ‘an immediate threat’. The suspects were ‘eliminated’ to ‘remove the threat’.
And now, compounding the madness of it all, the government responsible for this carnage has been given the right to push those who still remain alive in Gaza into a series of concentration camps and to take even more of their land. As political scientist Jason Hickel notes on X:
Israel will be assisted in this vile endeavour - known as Trump’s 20 Point Peace Plan - by willing helpers from the United States and the United Kingdom. Just to add a particularly ghastly garnish to the shit sandwich, notorious war criminal and ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was suggested as the coordinator of the “Board of Peace” - an Orwellian name if ever there was one - the transitional authority in charge of funding and managing the recovery of a post-war Gaza. In a rare show of defiance, however, the Arab states have refused to countenance Blair in this role so some other ghastly human with a less public record of horrors to their name will have to be found to replace him.
In the West Bank we are witnessing an escalating process of ethnic cleansing that is steadily destroying all hope of a viable Palestinian state - or even, at this rate, a viable Palestinian city or town - in the area. Settlers are allowed to freely rampage wherever they please - armed to the teeth by Itamar Ben Gvir’s new ‘give-a-settler-a-gun policy and backed up by the IDF - stealing Palestinian land, bulldozing houses, uprooting olive trees and generally making life impossible for the Palestinian people who live there.
And on the ever-shifting borders of Zion we have Lebanon constantly under attack by Israel (despite the fact there is supposed to be a ‘ceasefire’) and about to file a complaint against Israel with the UNSC for building a concrete wall on its southern border “that exceeds the blue line.”5 Israel has also been regularly bombing another of its neighbours, Syria - currently in disarray after the fall of the Assad government. This fall was funded & carried out by the United States which has installed a man called Ahmad al-Sharaa6, who has, in a very short time, undergone a remarkable transformation from head-chopping Al Qaeda / ISIS operative (and secret friend of the U.S. and Israel) to ‘civilised’ statesman (and public friend of the U.S. and Israel).
Oh, and lest I forget, not satisfied with bombing a couple of its neighbours at the same time as committing genocide in Gaza and ethnically cleansing the West Bank, Israel has also found the time to conduct airstrikes and targeted assassinations in Iran, Yemen, Tunisia and Qatar this year.
But the carnage is not restricted to the Middle East. In Africa we have the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a key Western ally, backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a Sudanese paramilitary group currently carrying out what looks very much like a genocide against the people of Sudan. And in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) a decades-long conflict began intensifying in late 2024, triggering a massive humanitarian crisis which has displaced thousands of people. There are also countless other ongoing insurgencies and armed conflicts across the rest of the continent too.
The roots of all this chaos can be traced directly back to Western colonisation. Western powers carved up the continent, taking no notice of tribal affiliations or natural borders, purely in order to extract its resources - including millions of its people - and send them back to the imperial core. And while the West claims to have ended its colonial domination of Africa it still has its fangs deeply embedded there. Indeed you don’t have to dig too deep to find the filthy fingerprints of Western powers and their proxies all over nearly every conflict going on in Africa right now.
While Westerners are very used to hearing about wars and conflicts in the Middle East and Africa they’re not so used to them happening in their own backyard - but such is the state of things in this Year of Our Lord 2025, that there also just happens to be a hot war in Europe too - between Russia and U.S. proxy Ukraine. I won’t get into the details of that conflict here but suffice to say the situation there is beyond dangerous because while it might look like this is between Russia and its neighbour it is, in reality, a war between the Russia and the United States7 - both nuclear-armed powers.
And then we come to the United States itself - the belly of the beast - where we are witnessing the descent of a country which has long been fascist-adjacent into open fascism with the second coming of Trump to the White House. Nearly 20 years ago, in 2007, Chris Hedges predicted what is now unfolding in the United States in his book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”.
While Donald Trump might seem about as far from a conservative Christian as it’s possible to get, he has courted conservative Christians ever since he entered politics and they now form the core of his base. Trump has often stated that the United States is a “nation of believers”. The first time he used this phrase was during a speech he gave at the 2018 National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gathering in Washington for U.S. political, military, and religious leaders and international guests8. He has continued to use it in a number of other speeches since - including his Easter 2025 message.
Trump has also incorporated the symbolism and rhetoric of Christian nationalism into his rallies and he has positive relations with the New Apostolic Reformation, a Christian supremacist theological movement associated with the far right. The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) combines elements of Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, and the Seven Mountain Mandate9 to advocate for spiritual warfare to bring about Christian dominion over all aspects of society and to ultimately end the separation of church and state.
Many NAR leaders and followers are enthusiastic supporters of Trump, viewing him as divinely appointed to facilitate NAR’s goals.
According to a 2024 article in The Conversation, the NAR positions Trump as
a warrior against a so-called demonically controlled – and therefore corrupted – “deep state,” aligning with NAR’s emphasis on spiritual warfare and cultural dominion as outlined in the “Seven Mountains” mandate. NAR leaders followed Trump’s understanding of a corrupt government.
This article further notes that several prominent members of the Trump Administration and the judiciary, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson10 and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, have flown the NAR-based ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag.
This, combined with the draconian clamp-down on First Amendment rights mainly aimed, for now, at critics of Israel and Trump’s intensifying ‘war’ on immigrants, strongly suggests that the ‘Christo-facism’ Hedges predicted back in 2007 may well have arrived. Although given the fanatic Zionism of a lot of these Christians, not to mention the Zionist take-over of major media and social media platforms in the effort to protect the U.S’s Middle East aircraft carrier Israel from blow-back for its two years of genocide, perhaps it might be more accurate to call this peculiarly American iteration of fascism ‘Judeo-Christian fascism’.
But the lunacy doesn’t stop with the United States. The leaders of U.S. vassal states in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand seem just as enthusiastic about ripping off the mask of genteel liberalism they’ve been hiding behind up until now and showing themselves to be just as batshit insane - and just as genocidal - as their U.S. masters.
Mark Rutte, the current head of NATO, has been running around the traps telling Europeans they have to prepare for war with Russia - adding for good measure that it will be a war “on the scale that our grandparents and great grandparents endured”. One thing you can absolutely guarantee, however, is that Rutte and his be-suited friends in the upper echelons of NATO and the EU will be nowhere near the frontlines in this terrible war they’re all gagging for.
In Germany, Chancellor Merz - a man who was Chairman of the Supervisory Board for BlackRock’s German branch from 2016 to 2018, essentially acting as its top political representative and lobbyist - has shown himself to be very enthusiastic about Rutte’s war. He’s not so enthusiastic that he’s actually going to fight in that war himself of course, but he’s very keen to make sure plenty of young German men do - so keen in fact he’s floating the possibility of mandatory military service in Germany.
Chancellor Merz has also declared himself to be equally enthusiastic about Israel’s ‘war’ on the people of Palestine when he said, with absolutely no shame, that “Israel is doing the dirty work for us”. I guess you can’t fault the guy for his honesty but this is a perfect illustration of how Western leaders have given up all pretence of being liberal protecters of human rights and democracy and just gone all in on being proudly genocidal.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given Chancellor Merz’s gratitude to Israel, police brutality against pro-Palestine protesters reached such a peak in Germany earlier this year that the United Nations was forced to call on the country to rein in its police force.
Over the channel in the United Kingdom things have also been pretty crazy - with the UK government on a zealous mission to arrest and/or harass journalists who continue to insist on telling the truth about Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza. In late 2024 journalist Sarah Wilkinson was arrested and journalist Richard Medhurst was detained at Heathrow Airport. Around the same time the British police also raided the home of Asa Winstanley, a journalist with the Electronic Intifada, seizing his devices under provisions of the UK’s ‘Terrorism Act’.
Hard on the heels of this spate of journalist arrests the UK’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, decided it was the perfect time to proclaim in the Guardian, that he was determined to protect journalism because it is “the lifeblood of democracy”. He also vowed to “fight any threats to those who hold the powerful to account”.
Not content with arresting journalists the UK government then decided to proscribe a direct action group Palestine Action as ‘terrorists’. When people protested against this draconian measure the UK Police proceeded to mass arrest hundreds of them as ‘supporters of terrorism’ for holding signs saying ‘We Support Palestine Action’. Amongst these frightening supporters of terrorism were blind pensioners, elderly men in wheelchairs, grandmothers, vicars, Holocaust survivors and academics. To date roughly 2000 people have been arrested for publicly proclaiming their support for the group.
The UK government and their servile media are also determinedly ignoring a hunger strike by eight Palestine Action activists who have been imprisoned, some up to 2 years, without trial. They have been without food for 40 days and several of them have been hospitalised but there has not been a peep out of Starmer or Lammy and there’s been barely a whisper about them in any of the major media outlets. As Zei Squirrel said on Twitter / X
If they had been Zionists on hunger strike for more genocide, or some Venezuelan, Cuban, Iranian gusano demanding the destruction of their own people and nation for the CIA, Mossad and MI6, everyone would know their names, endlessly and hysterically spread across the BBC, CNN, NYT, Guardian.
It’s quite something to reflect upon the fact that the some of the only people on this planet to really put themselves on the line to do anything that might practically stop this genocide are currently starving to death in prison in the UK while the powerful of this world ignore them as determinedly as they ignored - and are still ignoring - the genocide itself.
But the lunacy isn’t restricted to the UK and Europe - sadly the colonies are just as batshit insane. Canada, for example, recently detained former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, who spent years documenting Israeli abuses in the occupied territories, and his wife, legal scholar Hilal Elver, at Toronto Pearson Airport. The pair were questioned for more than four hours. A security officer informed them they were being held because “we’re concerned that you pose a national security threat to Canada.” Just for the record, Richard Falk is 95 and his wife Hilal Elver is 71. Falk said that the questioning centred around their work on Israel, Gaza and genocide.
Canadian universities are also shamelessly hosting ‘speaking events’ by IDF soldiers as part of the “Triggered: From Combat to Campus” tour.
But I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised about Canada’s enthusiasm for fascism - given they were the country whose Parliament gave a standing ovation to an actual Nazi - Yaroslav Hunka (of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division) - in 2023. It has also recently come to light that half the names on Canada’s controversial ‘Victims of Communism’ memorial - a memorial Canadians were forced to pay $6M for - belong to Ukrainian and Baltic Nazis, including Ante Pavelić, the leader of the collaborator Ustaše regime responsible for the extermination of 1 million Serbs.
It was reported in the Ottawa Citizen that the Department of Canadian Heritage has now reversed course on inscribing specific names. As department spokesperson Caroline Czajkowski said in an email:
The Government of Canada has emphasized that all aspects of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism must align with Canadian values of democracy and human rights. The Wall of Remembrance will now solely feature thematic content that conveys the broader commemorative and educational intent of the Memorial.
You literally could not make this shit up.
I’ve already covered some of the extreme lunacy - of the Zionist flavour - going on in Australia here but I’ll just do a quick round-up of some fresh lunacy that’s occurred since then.
The Australian government has, in its infinite wisdom, decided it needs an ‘Antisemitism Envoy’ due to a massive uptick in ‘antisemitism’ in the country since October 7, 2023. They then proceeded to hire an openly Zionist South African, Jillian Segal, to fill this vital position and they pay her $440,000 a year for her troubles. The government has also forked out thousands of dollars to fund Jillian’s recent trip to Israel.
It has also recently come to light - via heavily redacted documents procured via an FOI request - that the process used to hire Segal was, to put it mildly, a tiny tad dodgy. As noted by Michael West Media:
every document detailing assessments or the rationale for selection was either heavily redacted or withheld in full, primarily under the FOI Act’s deliberative processes exemption under s47C.
The Information Officer’s decision letter notes that Home Affairs undertook “extremely thorough” searches, but still located no resume, no risk assessments and no evaluation criteria ….
What survives the redactions paints a picture of a high-speed, politically sensitive process.
Interestingly, one of Segal’s other roles is chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC). The AICC profile on Guidestar (the regulating body for Israeli charities) shows that the organisation is funding Israel’s illegal settlement program. Up to 35% of funds go to areas Israel calls the ‘Judea and Samaria region’, the Northern District, and Jerusalem District (also known as ‘Greater Jerusalem’).
The very busy Segal also sits on the Board of Israel’s Weizmann Institute. Many of the drones Israel uses to kill Palestinians come out of Weizmann research labs in Tel Aviv which means that Australia’s ‘antisemitism envoy’ directly profits from Israel’s genocide.
In other news, it was recently revealed that New South Wales police have been wrongly categorising a ‘significant’ number of incidents as ‘antisemitic’. We wait with bated breath to see if this has any impact on Jillian Segal’s position which was created, so we were told, because of the massive increase in ‘antisemitic incidents’. Perhaps Australia will now realise that their ‘Antisemitism Envoy’ is surplus to requirements? Only time will tell.
Finally, as if things weren’t crazy enough in the land down under, a group called the Lions of Zion recently hosted a ‘family friendly celebration’ of Israel’s ‘bleeper operation’ - designed to ‘honour Mossad’ while ‘inspiring children’. Co-founder Isaac Balbin, who recently spoke at the anti-immigration ‘Put Australia First’ rally, earnestly explained that this ‘bleeper operation’ - which killed dozens of people and maimed and blinded thousands more, including many children - was “one of the most ingenious military operations in all of history”. The United Nations’ human rights chief, Volker Türk, said at the time that the attack violated international humanitarian law and constituted a war crime.
The event faced widespread condemnation from Lebanese and Muslim groups and has also been criticised by the Jewish Council of Australia — a group founded to represent progressive Australian Jews. Regardless of concerns, however, the ‘Lions Nerf Heroes Bleeper Operation’ went ahead on December 7 with Victoria Police saying they were aware of the event and they were ‘monitoring it for safety risks’. I wonder how authorities would have responded to an event celebrating a terrorist operation if it had been organised by the Lebanese or Muslim community?
Then, in September, my own dear little country, New Zealand - which had been keeping its tiny head below the parapet by voting in favour of numerous failed ceasefire motions and sending small amounts of humanitarian aid to Gaza but doing very little else - decided to join the Genocidal Lunatic Club too. As Madeline Chapman noted in The Spinoff
It was the broad assumption among New Zealanders that Peters would stand up [at the UNGA] and recognise the state of Palestine on behalf of all of New Zealand ... Instead, Peters stood up and told the UN General Assembly that New Zealand would not be recognising Palestinian statehood. And that New Zealand would not do so until the conflict ended.
Peters then doubled down on his position by informing other member states that that their decision to recognise Palestine could actually prove counter-productive to stopping Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
Earlier this week New Zealand also signalled a further move away from honouring international law and towards shamelessly supporting occupation and genocide by bucking tradition and abstaining on the UNGA vote declaring Israel’s occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights illegal. New Zealand was also one of the 54 countries that abstained in a recent United Nations General Assembly vote to adopt a new resolution proclaiming 14 December as the International Day against Colonialism in All Its Forms and Manifestations, to be observed annually from 2025.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.
Certainly there is a surfeit of passionate intensity in the worst; just look at some of the lunatics in the top echelons of the U.S. ranting on about the second coming, ‘end times’ and the coming of the Anti-Christ - Republican donor Peter Thiel being a particularly famous example of this. Furthermore, as pointed out by Michael Kruse in an article for Politico
For a while now, a roster of religious believers and leaders, grateful for the political victories Trump has bestowed in exchange for their votes, have suggested and sometimes outright said that Trump is “chosen,” or “anointed,”or a “savior,” or “the second coming” or “the Christ for this age.”
Trump, not surprisingly, seems to be embracing this view of himself. After his narrow escape from an assassin’s bullet he boasted “I was saved by God to make America great again”. As Robert Jeffress, a Trump-supporting pastor from Dallas, said recently “he came to the conclusion — the right conclusion — that God has a purpose for him.”
And if a Truth Social post after the decision of a federal court to overturn the tariffs at the heart of his economic program earlier this year is to be believed - it seems that not even significant set-backs can dent Trump’s sense of godly mission.
Peppered throughout all this Christian fervour like grenades in cotton candy, however, are openly genocidal statements from U.S. politicians -many of whom seem a lot less shy than they used to be about calling for the slaughter of their fellow humans. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, publicly celebrated the fact that the U.S. government is ‘killing all the right people’ and called for the use of “nuclear weapons” against Gaza to “level the place”, adding for good measure that “we are in a religious war here”.
Congressman Tim Walberg also seemed to be arguing for the nuclear option when he said that U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza should cease and that the situation “should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick”. Congressman Randy Fine agreed, suggesting that Gaza should be “nuked” and opining that “There is no suffering adequate for these animals. May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood”.
When asked about the killing of Palestinian children, Congressman Tim Ogles, a man who loves guns so much he posted a photo of his entire family holding guns in front of their Christmas tree, responded that “we should kill ‘em all” while Congressman Brian Mast is similarly enthusiastic about killing Palestinian children, suggesting that Palestinian babies are not innocent civilians but “terrorists” who should be killed and comparing Palestinian civilians to Nazis. And when Congresswoman Michelle Salzman was asked how many should die before there was a ceasefire she said “all of them”.
As for those running Israel - passionate intensity doesn’t even begin to describe them. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu passionately signalled Israel’s genocidal intentions very early on by comparing the Palestinians to ‘Amalek’ and declaring that the Bible demanded that the Jewish people “utterly destroy all that Amalek have and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey”.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has publicly stated that “we will wipe the smile from the Palestinians, but the screaming will remain” and openly advocated that Israel ‘re-settle’ Gaza, a plan which requires removing all the Palestinians by whatever means necessary.
Itamar Ben Gvir, Minister of National Security, and certifiable lunatic, recently declared that if the United Nations recognised a Palestinian state then Netanyahu should order the assassination of senior Palestinian Authority figures. He has also repeatedly called for the execution of Palestinian detainees. This deranged desire looks increasingly likely to be sated with a bill proposing the death penalty for those Israel deems to be terrorists having just passed its first reading in the Knesset.
Meanwhile, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has declared that “The army must find ways more painful than death for the civilians in Gaza. Killing them is not enough” and May Golan, the Minister for Social Equality and the Advancement of the Status of Women (yes, you read that very progressive-sounding title correctly), stated that she is “personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did”.
Former Knesset member and leader of leader of the libertarian Zionist party Zehut Moshe Feiglin has argued that “there are no innocent Germans” in reference to the Dresden bombings and similarly implies a lack of innocent people in Gaza who should be spared. He has also stated that “every child in Gaza is an enemy” and that the entire area should be leveled, with not a “stone upon stone” left.
Here are a few more , compiled by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, just to drive the point home that there’s no shortage of ‘passionate intensity’ amongst the worst.
A few years ago I would have agreed with the opening section of Yeats’ line too - that “the best lack all conviction'“ but now, not so much. It seems, thankfully, that passionate intensity is also present in the best of us - as has been amply demonstrated by the Palestinians of Gaza and the increasingly besieged West Bank- the journalists who won’t stop reporting even at risk of death, the first responders, the medical staff, the parents risking their lives to protect and feed their children. The passionate intensity of the love that the Palestinian people have for their land and for each other shines like a beacon in an otherwise very dark world.
Other beacons of positive passionate intensity are Palestinians in the diaspora like writer Susan Abulhawa, poet Mosab Abu Toha, plastic surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta (currently facing his 10th lawsuit from UK Lawyers for Israel), political analyst Mouin Rabbani, journalist Ali Abunimah, activist and scholar Hanan Ashrawi and many, many more. Then there are the anti-Zionist Jews such as political scientist Norman Finkelstein, physician and author Gabor Maté and his sons Aaron and Daniel, historian Zachary Foster, activist Medea Benjamin, journalist Nora Barrows-Friedman, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and, again, many, many more.
And, of course, not to forget the fabulous humans aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla, the most famous of all being the indefatigable Greta Thunberg. And finally - a very honourable mention to the equally indefatigable Francesca Albanese11 UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian territories - as well as hundreds of others, well-known and unknown, who have raised their voices for the rights of Palestinians to live freely and without fear in their own land.
“Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand”.
This longing for a ‘revelation’, for a second coming, that Yeats expresses at this point in the poem reflects the longing that many of us who cry out for a more just world express on the daily in our Substacks, our blogs and our social media posts. Surely, we say to ourselves and to each other, surely things can’t go on like this. Surely things will reach such a point that the entire rotten system will finally fall and something better will rise from the ashes. Surely … and yet, so far, it seems that any kind of redemption is still a long way off.
Of course such longings - for a revelation and for ‘the second coming’ - are also rampant on the other side of the fence - amongst the Christian and Jewish far right. Indeed, with the rise of Judeo-Christo-fascism in the imperial core and Judeo-facism in the Western Empire’s existentially important vassal state in the Middle East, we are surrounded by such narratives - parroted in apparent seriousness by people who should know better - of end-times, the Rapture and the ‘second coming’ of ‘our Lord’ Jesus Christ, the coming of the ‘anti-Christ’12 and desire of some in high places for the construction in Jerusalem of the ‘Second Temple’.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight.
According to Wiktionary Spiritus Mundi refers to
“The spirit, outlook, point of view, or social and cultural values characteristic of an era of human history”.
The translation from Latin is "spirit of the world" and for Yeats himself Spiritus Mundi was the source of all images and symbols, a sort of collective unconscious and creative wellspring. If Yeats thought the ‘world consciousness’ was ‘troubling’ back in 1919 imagine what he’d think of it now.
In Decline of the West - written around the same time as The Second Coming - Oswald Spengler, suggested that
Western or “Faustian” culture is characterized by its restless thrust toward the infinite and unattainable, or the “conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole”. The Faustian individual “strives to direct the world according to his will”.
This certainly sounds like an appropriate description of major aspects of our current ‘world consciousness’ - a consciousness with its roots in ‘the Enlightenment’. The Enlightenment is, perhaps not surprisingly, a period fetishised by our current elite who would have us believe it gave us, in the words of one of their pet ‘intellectuals’ Steven Pinker, “peace, prosperity and progress”. Englightenment thinkers placed humans and their endeavours at the centre of existence, elevated the individual and his ‘rights’ above the collective and idolised the notion of perpetual ‘progress’.
Perhaps the most obvious exemplars of this aspect early 21st Century ‘world consciousness’ are the tech billionaires. Let’s look at four particularly prominent specimens:
Elon Musk - a malignant narcissist who poses as a free speech absolutist while heavily censoring pro-Palestinian voices on his social media platform Twitter / X, an immigrant to the U.S. who is profoundly anti-immigration, a techno-feudalist who believes humanity must colonise space to survive.
Peter Thiel - a Christian fundamentalist who pours huge sums into start-ups aiming to cheat ageing and death, and who runs a non-profit promoting the creation of autonomous floating cities outside of national jurisdictions.
Alex Karp - who defends ‘being an arrogant prick’ and believes more CEOs should follow his example and who believes that the future is a collaboration between humans and synthetic intelligence. Karp declared that the founding mission of his company Palantir was “defending the west”.
Jeff Bezos - a man who treats his employees like slaves and who, like Thiel, is obsessed with living forever and, like Musk, is pouring billions into research aimed at “facilitating travel to, and settlement of, manmade colonies in outer space”
All these men are, not surprisingly, also fanatically pro-Western, extremely right-wing economically (and often culturally too) and enthusiastic supporters of gloves-off capitalism. Some of them identify as ‘libertarian’ and champions of ‘free speech’ but scratch the surface and all of them have a strong authoritarian streak. They’re also all ludicrously, obscenely wealthy and they all use that wealth to influence society and politics in various ways - both indirectly via various ‘philanthropic’ endeavours and directly - via donations to politicians and political parties.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given these men are the personification of the current ‘spiritus mundi’, another aspect of our modern ‘world spirt’ is the worship of wealth, particularly extreme wealth. This is exemplified by the excesses of some of the above-mentioned billionaires. Jeff Bezos springs immediately to mind - his recent wedding shut down Venice for 3 days while he and his celebrity guests cavorted in the canals and streets of that storied city. It is also illustrated by that group of people we categorise as ‘celebrities’ - individuals who have ended up at the top of the heap in the fields of entertainment, the arts and sport and who are obsessively lauded for their achievements by a fawning media. The Kardashians are perhaps the one of the most perfect exemplars - a family who seem, as far as I can tell, to be famous simply for being famous13 and whose excesses are constantly splashed all over the front pages, and the screens, of the world’s media.
But perhaps one of the purest distillations of the current ‘world spirit’ is one Donald J. Trump - current U.S. president, property tycoon, billionaire and flaunter of wealth par excellence. A man whose narcissism is the stuff of legends - with 15 massive towers dedicated to himself dotted around the world and a massive God complex. A man found guilty on numerous counts of business fraud. A man who was best friends with notorious child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein who, in a recently released tranche of emails said of his good buddy that he was “Dirty.” “F--king crazy.” “Borderline insane.” He also said that Trump was a Mafia don but with the “great dangerous power” of being America’s president and commander in chief and added “I am the one able to take him down.”
And speaking of Jeffrey Epstein - now a by-word for the decadence, corruption and depravity of our late capitalist elites - at least three of the tech billionaires discussed above are also known to have direct links to the man: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Decadence and depravity often tend to signal of the beginnings of the end of empire and indeed, Oswald Spengler predicted that the West would enter its pre-death emergency at the beginning of the 21st century. Not to be a doom-monger but Spengler seems to have had access to a pretty good crystal ball because here we are, at the beginning of the 21st Century, and the capitalist, imperialist West is giving off very strong ‘pre-death emergency’ vibes.
Finally I think I’ll just leave the last words to Yeats because, really, what else is there left to say at this point … as the people of Sudan and the Congo suffer and die for the gold, oil, copper, cobalt and lithium needed to power our high tech system and maintain the wealth and power of the already obscenely rich, as Ukrainian men are thrown into the Russian meat-grinder while U.S. companies gobble up more and more of their land, as Europe prepares for war with Russia on behalf of the U.S. while the U.S. prepares for war with Venezuela, as the rich get richer and crazier and their hold upon us all gets tighter and more sinister, as the media continues to tell us that black is white and 2 + 2 = 5.
And as Israel, the bloody spear-tip of Western imperialism, keeps on killing and expanding, supported by the entire West and by bought-and-paid for Arab vassals …
… Somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
‘Buzzing, blooming confusion’ is actually a phrase coined by late 19th Century American psychologist William James to describe how an infant experiences the world as a jumble of unorganized sensations from their eyes, ears, nose, and skin but it seems apropos for the moment right now.
Yeats’ wife Georgie, pregnant with their first child, Anne, had caught the virus and during the weeks preceding the composition of The Second Coming was very close to death. Yeats wrote the poem while Georgie was convalescing.
According to Google’s very helpful AI "The West," or the "Western World," generally includes countries in Western Europe, North America (Canada, the U.S.), Australasia (Australia, New Zealand), and some nations in Central Europe, along with Israel and sometimes Japan and South Korea due to their shared values. Google also helpfully notes that Israel is often included in '“The West” due to its democratic system and Western-style culture. According to Google, countries included in ‘The West’ are characterised by a Judeo-Christian ethic, Greco-Romanphilosophical influences, and democratic governance.
Which for Yeats meant that ordinary people are no longer paying heed to the wisdom of their alleged social betters whom he regarded as born to rule. Yeats’ politics were conservative and leaned towards the authoritarian.
The blue line is a boundary drawn by the UN, separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israeli forces withdrew to the blue line when they left southern Lebanon in 2000.
Previously known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani.
Though it is looking increasingly likely that the U.S. has passed the baton onto its willing and very, very stupid, poodles in the EU to pursue this particular war while it concentrates on Latin America - Venezuela is firmly in its gun-sights right now - and China.
This event is organized by a private, non-profit group and has been attended by every U.S. president since its formal founding in 1953 by President Eisenhower (Wikipedia)
An evangelical Christian ideology that believes Christians should gain influence and “take dominion” over seven key areas of society: family, religion, education, government, media, business, and the arts. While its initial goal was evangelism, it later evolved to include a more explicit focus on strategic social and political influence (Wikipedia).
Before entering politics Mike Johnson spent more than two decades defending conservative Christian causes as a litigator at the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom.
Francesca Albanese is currently under U.S. sanctions which mean she can’t travel, can’t bank, can’t even book a hotel, and her American-born daughter could face a felony charge for buying her breakfast. These sanctions were imposed after Albanese published a report exposing the role of U.S. companies in the Gaza genocide.
As reported in the Guardian, Thiel recently hosted a series of four lectures in which he mused who the antichrist could be and warned that Armageddon is on its way. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. According to Thiel, international bodies including the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. He also suggests that international organisations which make it more difficult for people to put their wealth into tax havens are a sure sign the antichrist may be amassing power. As Thiel notes sadly: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”
The family first came under the media spotlight when the patriarch, Robert Kardashian, became one of OJ Simpson’s lawyers. But, according to Wikipedia, the launching pad for the Kardashian empire was when one of Robert’s daughters, Kim, sold a pornographic film - Kim Kardashian - Superstar featuring ex-boyfriend, singer Ray J. The rest, as they say, is history.
Brilliant word-smithing again, Karyn. The insanity of today’s world is highlighted by the mentally and morally tormenting paradox that we are meant to see all of this insanity as perfectly sane, generated–as it is in the most part–by the noble, ever-so-enlightened culture of the West; a culture supposedly defined by its humanity (despite its almost continuous history of genocidal behaviour); its rationality (despite the utter self-annihilating lunacy of its capitalism-soaked logic of continuous expansion and domination); its freedom (despite the ‘leader of the free world’ having the highest incarceration rates on the planet) and, not to forget, its fundamental concern with individual rights (despite the selective dismissal or overriding of them whenever required, which seems to be most of the time at present). Reminds me of the quote from ‘M: Son of the Century’ about Mussolini’s view of his supporters: “The important thing is to be something that allows them to avoid the encumbrances of consistency, the dead weight of principles.” Our Spiritus Mundi is just this fascistic impulse, to be unshackled from any ‘centre’ and to be free of it ‘holding’. A centre that holds is a constraint on pure action - the well-spring of fascism (Of course, when I say ‘our’ I mean ‘our elite’s’.)
It really is a sh!tshow on speed… 😵💫