WHEN EMPIRES DIE...

Adults discussing geopolitics.

by Duns Scotus 

Countries that are good at war are good at peace. Unfortunately America has been adept at neither, and its fleeting elevation to global hegemon status was mainly due to unusually good luck and the fact that its main rivals all cancelled each other out for a convenient period.

TRUMP'S RECOGNITION OF JERUSALEM AS CAPITAL UNDERMINES US POSITION IN MIDDLE EAST

by Alt-Right News

Days after the Supreme Court upheld Donald Trump's "Muslim Ban," in a further blow for Muslims, the US President has finally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

This is a game-changer in the Middle East, as the US has long held off recognizing Jerusalem as the capital in order to maintain the thin pretense that it is an "honest broker" between the Israelis and the Arabs. Of course, it is nothing of the sort, being heavily biased towards Israel's interests, due to the massive amount of Jewish political donations in the US political system, as well as Jewish control and influence of the media. An additional reason is the philo-Semitism of many American Christian fundamentalists.

ISIS AND THE BLONDE YAZIDI BLOODLINE

Images of Yazidi children.

by Max Kaeser

Being a direct descendant of Yazidis, through my paternal lineage, the call of the blood, the call of the Heimat, the call of my own people is strong. My grandfather's last name was and still is El Yazidi, and being the man  I am – a Yazidi born in Africa – it pains me to see and hear all the stories of how the daughters of my ethnicity are enslaved, sold for sex slaves, consumed in their captivity to death because of their religion, because of the way they look, at the hands of Islamic Jihadists.

AT WAR WITH "OURSELVES" IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Zohak and his serpents

by Colin Liddell

For the first time since 1815, Britain and the US are effectively at war, although rather than the bayous of Louisiana or the forests of the Canadian borders, the battleground is the deserts of the Middle East, where a “Brit” with a London accent — dubbed by the ever inventive and alliterative UK press “Jihad John” — took fanatical pleasure is hacking off the head of an American journalist after US forces bombed Islamic State forces advancing on Kurdish positions.

VERMINOCRACY II: THE ISLAMIC CALIPHATE

The Islamic State: keeping ahead of the situation.

by Colin Liddell

Nature abhors a vacuum, and will often work overtime and at the weekends to fill one. In the Middle East it has pushed productivity to new heights with the creation of the Islamic Caliphate, a fully-fledged monstrosity that has leaped to life in a comparatively short time span, filling the vacuum left by the West's vetoing of the system that emerged in the post-Ottoman Islamic world as a tentative step from medievalism to modernity.

That system, typified by the likes of Kemal Ataturk, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and the Assads – and to a lesser extent by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Shah of Iran – was a secular-leaning, trans-tribal nationalism, often with a socialist tinge, overlaid – thanks to a brief period of Anglo-French control – on areas with badly drawn borders. In Iraq and Syria it went by the name of Ba'athism, but it could also be more generically (and oxymoronically) referred to as Secular Islamic Statism (SIS).

DEATH WISH IN GAZA

Thinking it isn't the same as doing it.

by Colin Liddell

Maybe I should draw a graph, but intelligent people don't need one. All they need is a word to the wise and that word is: "When the death toll is only in the hundreds, PR matters a hell of a lot." So, it is for Israel in its latest messy little border war in Gaza.

The fact is that whatever happens in the next few days and weeks, at some point in the future the Jews of Israel are going to wake up to peace and possibly bird song, but Gaza with its teeming slums and festering loathing for them will still be there, breathing the same air – and so will the Palestinians on the West Bank, and the millions of Palestinians camped around the borders of Israel (or Palestine as they will continue to call it).

ANTI-GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORICAL CHOKE POINTS

Salamis, one of the great choke points of World history.

by Duns Scotus

At an essential level, Russians lack a sense of geography. That’s why they live in Russia, one of the least ‘geographical’ places on the face of the Earth. "Anti-geography" flows from those flat, ill-defined spaces the same way that water flows into a swamp. Let me expand on this theme because it is unclear, which is exactly what Russia did in its history: expanded because it was unclear!

"Where does our Russian land begin and that of our neighbours end? Not sure. Best annex them."

Most countries exist within distinct geographical areas – France with its Alps, Pyrenees, and Rhine, Japan with its chain of islands, are classic examples. Where these don’t exist, problems occur and empires sometimes arise as solutions. The problem can also be observed on the civilizational level.

STABBED IN THE BACK?

Trying to poz Bibi's Negev hole?

by Colin Liddell

What’s Super Autocue-reading Boy up to this time? A couple of weeks after unleashing his “Seals of Death” against the Bearded-but-almost-forgotten One, which was one week after unleashing his recently re-remembered Hawaiian birth chit, he now comes out, 1960s-Batman-style, with a new, shiny, Middle-Eastern peace plan that looks set to upset the Jewish lobby—Biff!Zap!Bam! Kapow!

Is this more evidence of the “chaos theory” that Igor Shishkin says lies at the heart of American foreign policy? The simple, low maintenance theory for all this is that Obama is simply making pointless “feel good” sound bites, with those pulling his strings knowing full well that a reversion to Israel’s pre-1967 borders has as much chance as a snowball in the Negev (85 percent of which is used by the Israeli military for training purpose). May as well send a train down a track without any sleepers.

A slightly more abstruse theory is that the White House’s “Big Idea” at the moment is to place itself at the forefront of the Arab Spring, even though this might deprive the Democrats of some of the more naïve shekels.