Greater love haS no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Posted on March 13, 2024January 31, 2025 by Ray Joseph Cormier

Those with a TV can see by the images shown every Day, Israel is perpetrating a genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza in a way much worse that the original Nakba aka catastrophe of 1948 that forced Palestinians to flee to Gaza because of Zionist TERRORISTS.

Just looking at the destruction of Palestinian homes in Gaza shows Israel has every intention to drive Palestinians out making Gaza unlivable, attempting to force them into Egypt to make way for ILLEGAL Jewish settlers to take over Gaza with fewer Palestinians to resist the Israeli land grab.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-destruction-bombing-israel-aa528542

If the bombs don’t kill enough with over 13,000 CHILDREN killed already, Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza Hospitals is designed to make sure there will be no adequate treatment of wounds, ensuring even more Death and Disease to kill even more Palestinians.

The purpose of this article is to remember Aaron Bushnell, who like the Title, sacrificed his life taking an Action so horrific so the people in Gaza might live. Learning of his sacrifice February 26, I tweeted Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s National Security Advisor this;

@JakeSullivan46

You and the President are responsible for the Death of US Serviceman Aaron Bushnell’s self immolation in protest of the Israeli genocide in Gaza as you blame Putin for the death of Navalny. The SOB President has the Power and leverage to stop the genocide. Do it

THE BURNING SOLDIER

Burning with passion for Palestine, active-duty U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire, committing suicide to protest genocide.

Make no mistake: Aaron Bushnell is not a role model. Don’t set yourself on fire! Do not emulate self-immolation. But do let it illuminate a very dark situation.

And not just any dark situation. Aaron Bushnell did not set himself on fire over the “Israel/Hamas war” as the mainstream media (MSM) tried to explain, before moving on to the weather report, nor was he experiencing a mental health episode that could have been alleviated with a pill or a call to a suicide hotline, as implied by other MSM hasbara.

“They want us to believe we are mad and this war is sane,” observed CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair.

Indeed, on his own Twitch-broadcast livestream, Aaron Bushnell sanely and calmly spelled out exactly what he was protesting as he marched to the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, wearing his U.S. military fatigues. “My name is Aaron Bushnell,” he said. “And I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Then he set his phone to auto-record, and he set himself on fire.

He poured the kerosene on his head, stuck his cap back on and, just before he struck the match, a disembodied voice with the banality of a store clerk inquired, “Can I help you, Sir?”

Then suddenly, the blaze erupted, and Airman Aaron Bushnell became a real-life “Burning Man,” a Burning Soldier, marching in place in what must have been searing agony, yelling, “Free Palestine!” over and over again – his voice raw with pain mixed with love for the Palestinian people, so many of whom have been and are still being burned alive by Israeli bombs, paid for by American taxpayers – until he fell to the ground in flames.

“Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” yelled someone, presumably an Israeli embassy guard. Slowly, the guard walked toward the fire, arms stretched taut, hands together, holding a gun on the Burning Soldier as he burned to death.

A gun?

Another guy, perhaps a paramedic, arrived on the scene shouting, “Yo! I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.”

What a moment. A quintessential defining snapshot of humanity, as the world turns and we all burn – as we go on fighting wars, bombing civilians and shooting our neighbors – when the wisest amongst us can barely be heard above the violence, stating the obvious…

“I don’t need guns! I need fire extinguishers!”

Finally, the fire extinguishers arrived, a little too late and spraying clouds of foam all over the Burning Soldier’s burned body, as everyone (but Aaron) shouted, panicked, and someone near the camera asked, “What is that? Who is this?”

Then the camera switched off.

What Are You Doing Right Now?

Before his dramatic act of blazing protest, Aaron Bushnell posed this question, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘what would I do if I was alive during slavery/ or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Then Aaron set himself on fire. That was his answer to his own challenge. I’m not saying it was a good answer. It wouldn’t be my answer. It’s not an answer I would recommend to anyone. But it was his answer, and I respect it.

He could have posted his views on social media, like so many of us do, or gone to a protest, or done a podcast. He could have drowned his sorrows in beer or porn or ketamine. He could have killed himself less flamboyantly with pills, or perhaps a gun, maybe taking a few friends or strangers down with him, as so many American ammosexual mass murderers have done. Instead, his answer to his question, “What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” was to set himself on fire for all the world to see, feel and take note.

It’s tragic, and very strange, but I feel a kinship with Aaron Bushnell. Maybe it’s because he’s a self-described “anarchist” and a performance artist who performed the ultimate act of anarchistic political performance art protest on Sunday, February 25, 2024, and he did it with such pacifist grace and humble purity, without physically harming anyone but himself.

U.S. Airman Bushnell was trained to be a cog in the American war machine, but for one brief moment he clogged the gears, broke the machine, transformed his destiny and brought the entire Military Industrial Complex to a screeching halt. He fought fire with fire and sacrificed his life, transmogrifying himself into the Burning Soldier for Palestine.

From Burning Monk to Burning Soldier

Aaron Bushnell’s performance protest triggered one of my first memories of any kind of protest. I was about five years old, too little to read or even watch the news, but I caught a glimpse of something that transcended “news” in my father’s newspaper, an extraordinary black and white photo that showed a man on fire, sitting cross-legged on a busy street.

Having been taught never to even touch a hot stove, my kindergarten brain wondered, “How could he do such a thing?” as the image branded itself into my brain.

I later learned that the man in the photo was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức who burned himself alive, using principles of Mahayana meditation, to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the US-supported Catholic government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Diem.

He became known as the “Burning Monk.”

Frightening and mystical as it was, the “Burning Monk” photo taken by AP photographer Malcomb Browne had a huge impact on people’s impressions of America’s presence in Vietnam. Several other self-immolation protests have occurred since then, including an unnamed woman holding a Palestinian flag in front of Atlanta’s Israeli consulate in 2023. Unfortunately, her protest was not filmed, and the MSM was able to spin a more Zionism-friendly narrative, quoting Israeli consul general Anat Sultan-Dadon’s portrayal of the woman’s final act as an expression of “hate and incitement toward Israel” – before sweeping it under the imperialist rug.

Not so with Aaron Bushnell; a 25-year-old Whitmore, Massachusetts native raised on a Christian compound called the Community of Jesus, who joined the air force, becoming a cyber defense operations specialist with the 531st intelligence support squadron at joint base San Antonio, Texas. You could question his background (was that compound a cult?), but his motivations would not be so easily mischaracterized by the MSM spin doctors, as his fiery self-sacrifice on the altar of the Israeli embassy, along with his words explaining it, was live-streamed for the world to see, achieving a monumental impact that has yet to be measured.

Aaron Bushnell, the Burning Soldier, marched through that fire into the hearts and minds of millions. He marched into the history books – if there are to be history books in our future. He certainly marched into trending topics.

Unsurprisingly, his actions were often misinterpreted, minimized as “mentally ill” and even mocked on social media, but he also sparked a lot of art, memorials and tributes, including Gaza Fights for Freedom filmmaker Abby Martin’s Portland vigil, featuring her husband, U.S. army veteran and anti-war activist Mike Prysner and fellow About Face: Veterans Against the War. Mike’s tribute to Bushnell and Abby and Robbie Martin’s Media Roots Radio show on “The Self-Immolation of Aaron Bushnell” are also very moving.

Mid-vigil, Mike and the other veterans burned their military uniforms in a can of fire, chanting, “Remember Aaron Bushnell! He’s not alone.”

Holy Fire

Chanting, dancing or just sitting around a bonfire like that feels sacred. In the Bible, fire represents the “holy spirit.” Moses encounters God in the “burning bush,” the prophet Elijah ascends to heaven in a “Chariot of Fire,” and the Hanukkah candles that only had enough oil to last 24 hours burn for a miraculous eight days.

But fire isn’t all sparkles and light. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is condemned to suffer for eternity for having given humanity the gift of fire.

Whatever your beliefs, fire illuminates what you might not otherwise see, and the firelight of the Burning Solider illuminates the plight of the Palestinians burning, suffering and dying under Zionist apartheid and genocide. It illuminates our need to protest, to resist ennui and despair.

Whatever we do or don’t do, every precious moment, we are answering Aaron’s question, “What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”

Saint Joan Burned at the Stake

The Burning Soldier triggered another old memory for me. When I was a shy but drama-loving adolescent, I played the title role in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, which focuses on Joan of Arc’s trial before she was burned at the stake. I was no Marie Falconetti – luminous star of Carl Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, “Passion of Joan of Arc” (also featuring another of my fiery favorites, Antonin Artaud). However, for my sheltered little middle class mind, learning lines for a high school play, it was a deep challenge to just contemplate being burned alive.

Yikes!

I learned that Joan was given a chance to live if she would just recant her “voices” and stop wearing “men’s clothes,” but she refused. She made a choice to be burned at the stake (according to Shaw); it was an act of voluntary self-immolation – to make a spiritual, political point – like Aaron Bushnell. Whether or not her point was taken, in 1920 (three years before Shaw wrote his play), Joan of Arc was canonized by the Catholic Church as “Saint Joan.”

Who will canonize the Burning Soldier? Will he be honored like Vietnam’s Burning Monk revered by Buddhists as a Bodhisattva?

Fire Fetish

Being a sex therapist, I always wonder about the sexual angles of things, and though I wouldn’t call a Burning Soldier “sexy” or even particularly sexual, I would say it was an erotic action, an act of Eros, the Greek god of sex, love and life itself. In that sense, Aaron Bushnell’s live streamed self-sacrifice was an act of noble exhibitionism and, in a way, quite beautiful. Fire can radiate great beauty, and since the video never shows Aaron Bushnell’s charred body (even in the unpixellated version) we just see a dazzling man on fire – a real Burning Man.

I wonder how the Burners feel about the Burning Soldier. The Burning Man founders I knew from my Golden Gate Bridge-climbing days with the Suicide Club would have been obsessed by him, though who knows? Nothing and no one stays the same, especially when touched by fire.

Maybe I’m a little fire-“touched” myself… or is that torched? One of my ex-boyfriends juggled fire, and I’ve always been a bit of a pyrophiliac, not drawn to setting fires, but just to watching fireworks, hot wax play, the romance of candelabras, the fetish of firelight. Not to disrespect the purity of Airman Bushnell’s sacrifice; these are just the wildfire thoughts of a sexologist observing a riveting act of extreme political protest.

As long as we’re talking kink, it bears mentioning that when it comes to the truly dark, depraved, violent and dystopian fetishes of war, the IDF or IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) sadistic war porn is off the charts, far worse than George W. Bush’s P.O.W. Porn at Abu Ghraib – and that’s just what the Israelis themselves show openly on their own channels.

Of course, a fetish is not *just* about sex; a fetish is also a spiritual symbol, like a rabbit’s foot, a flag, a man dying on a cross for humanity’s sins, or a burning soldier protesting a genocide.

But it is more than a symbol; Aaron’s fire dance is a heartfelt and romantic sacrifice of eros – life – for the love of Palestine. He went up in flames in Palestine’s name.

Eros travels fast these days, and Aaron Bushnell’s eternal Eros, his love for Palestine, is already being returned a million-fold, as Palestinians are carrying pictures of Aaron Bushnell, honoring him as a “martyr” and their American superhero. More powerful than Superman or Spiderman, at least in their lives, is Aaron Bushnell’s Burning Soldier whose pain illuminates theirs.

Cannon Fodder to Canonized Fighter

On our recent Callin show, we talked about the Burning Soldier and the many thousands of Palestinian women, men, children, doctors, journalists and artists, who have been incinerated by Israel’s U.S. taxpayer-paid bombs, as well as starved to death while Genocide Joe lasciviously licks his ice cream.

One of our callers, Maria, a George Galloway and Beatles fan in the Midwest, was extremely moved by the sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell, almost like he’s a close relative of hers. In fact, she was rather peeved that he hasn’t been honored like the Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi whose self-immolation was praised by Barack Obama, and helped to trigger the Arab Spring.

The difference is disturbingly clear: Not to minimize either sacrifice, but Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation served the interests of U.S. Empire, and Bushnell’s does the opposite, refusing to be “complicit” in Uncle Sam’s dirty deeds.

So, let’s not expect Ice Cream Joe to memorialize the great American Burning Soldier, U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell, at his State of the Union address, but I will at my upcoming State of the Sexual Union address (here’s last year’s); every little bit of love counts in this hate-filled world.

Another Callin caller, Joshua, an active-duty U.S. Army serviceman, identified as “right-wing” and didn’t agree with Bushnell’s “anarchist” politics, but he couldn’t help but be impressed by the extraordinary “discipline” of Airman Bushnell whose blazing courage transformed himself from cannon fodder to canonized fighter for Palestine.

He was also impressed by Capt’n Max’s tales of his own sharpshooting prowess when he was in basic training, hitting 11 out of 12 targets – though the moral of the story is that as soon as Max saw he could shoot, he realized he “could kill somebody,” threw down his rifle and quit.

How Max managed to quit the army with an honorable discharge is another story; there are many ways to make like bonobos, not baboons. But it’s especially difficult when you’re in the U.S. Military. So… radiant or revolting, the Burning Soldier’s fiery protest should be a flaming red flag for the rest of us.

Ceasefire now! Before it’s too late, and our whole world catches fire.

The author of this article, Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels.

Re-post from https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/07/the-burning-soldier/

Updated: Here’s full unedited, graphic video of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. It’s now 2 a.m. and that’s appropriate, as this piece notes below, after Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, people were screaming “Dignity! Dignity!” out their windows at 2 a.m.

We should see the gruesome reality of Israel’s horrors and genocide against the Palestinian people. And we should see the agony that a determined Aaron went through to try to end it.

https://husseini.substack.com/p/ignoring-immolators-lulls-the-society

This was tweeted to Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor Today, March 14;

@JakeSullivan46 @Morning_Joe @AymanMSNBC @andersoncooper @wolfblitze

https://johnmenadue.com/history-will-record-that-israel-committed-a-holocaust/

You, Jake, and Biden are complicit!

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation — Conquest, War, Famine and Death — are now galloping from one end of Gaza to the other. Gaza is only 26 miles long from North to South at the Egyptian border.

EXODUS WAS THE 1ST LABOUR MOVEMENT

Posted on May 15, 2022January 31, 2025 by Ray Joseph Cormier

When I read Bible History, I can see Moses taking the Hebrew slaves out of the Egyptian Economy as the 1st Bible record of the 1st Labour Movement.

When Pharaoh’s Advisors told him what letting the low cost workers go meant for the Egyptian Economy, he had to get them back but it was too late.

The Writing’s on the Wall!

While most people know what’s implied using the adage, most don’t know it comes from Bible History.

Some 2600 years ago, the king of Babylon put on a great feast for 1000 of the Elite of his kingdom and they praised the gods of gold, silver, brass, iron, wood and stone.

From THEN to NOW, it’s The Economy, Stupid! as that adage goes.

The Elite are still the Elite.

Today’s Religious Establishment rarely or never, expounds on the Apostle James prophecy, as it applies to this Material World’s Economic-Labour Realities Today.

As the Locals begin to experience a tightening Economic straitjacket because of increasingly perceptible Economic Inequality, many will wake up to the Realities, some toward violence and some toward Peaceful change.

American Oligarchs are making more money off the Ukraine War than Russian Oligarchs are. There’s no talk yet of seizing the wealth of the American Oligarchs, but in the Spirit of The Times they’re next in line, if we don’t blow ourselves up before then.

Go to now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth eaten.

Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. You have heaped treasure together for THE LAST DAYS.

Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by FRAUD, cries: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord Almighty.

You have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; you have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.

You have condemned and killed the just; and he does not resist you.

Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waits for the precious fruit of the earth, and has long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.

You also be patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draws close.

James 5

The US has made regime change of the governments on this Earth it can’t control as American as Apple Pie.

While all the Establishment Churches preach we’re in THE LAST DAYS, they can’t see they’re the same LAST DAYS James wrote about some 1900 years ago.

It implies when The Christ returns, there will be a Global Regime Change of the 2755 Oligarchs of this World, orchestrating governments to pass laws to make them even richer.

We’ve arrived at The Valley of Decision!

In Bible History, Babylon was the 1st Nation to reach Military-Economic Superpower Status, able to set the Rules for the Rules Based Order the weaker Nations of that Time had to follow or face Economic and Military Wrath of the Superpower.

Since the record from 2600 years ago, the US is the latest, greatest of all the Nations reaching that Superpower Status, replacing the 247 year British Empire Navy, with the US Navy Ruling the Waves.

What is interesting to note is Babylon is now called Iraq.

The Tail struck the Head in 2003 leading to the unravelling of the Biblical Babylon Economic-Military-Political system of this World.

The Ukraine War is the latest Red Flag Warning and Sign, this World is on that Path.

The entire Russian Military Budget was $60 BILLION last year. Dragging out the Afghanistan War for 20 years and $2 TRILLION, made a lot of American Oligarchs rich off WAR. It’s not only Russian Oligarchs.
Most Christian America turns a BLIND eye to that reality!

The US DoD budget was only $60 BILLION when Eisenhower pointed this out in 1953 DOLLARS with his CROSS OF IRON speech.

What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war.
The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and labour of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system, or the Soviet system, or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.

Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a CROSS OF IRON. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953 – and Summer of 2022.

labor Power, Wages, and Inequality

On March 7, 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury issued a report titled, “The State of Labor Market Competition.” It is not what one might expect from the U.S. government. It is apparent that something is unusual when the first chapter is “Theories of Labour Market Power,” and the word “power” appears 15 times in the executive summary, 12 times in the introduction, and too many times to count in the body of the report. Power, after all, is generally absent from mainstream myths of how labour markets work.

STATE OF THE WORLD

Posted on September 13, 2018March 17, 2024 by Ray Joseph Cormier

Jonathan Cook is an Independent British Journalist living in Arab Nazareth of Occupied Palestine, the place where Jesus was raised up. He is published frequently in the Middle East but he is avoided like the plague by US and Western MSM because he gets what Palestinians have to go through with the Israeli Occupation/Military Dictatorship over Palestinians, and writes clearly and succinctly about it.

This is his latest publication appearing Today and while he writes in non-religious terms, he is basically articulating what I see unfolding in this Material World through a Biblical perspective, and agree with this analysis.

Our broken system has no ‘moderate’ devotees

13 September 2018

Western politics is tearing itself apart, polarising into two camps – or at least, it is in the official narrative we are being fed by our corporate media. The warring camps are presented as “moderate centrists”, on one side, and the “extreme right”, on the other. The question is framed as a choice about where one stands in relation to this fundamental political divide.

But what if none of this is true? What if this isn’t a feud between two opposed ideological camps but rather two differing – and irrational – reactions to the breakdown of late-stage capitalism as an economic model, a system that can no longer offer plausible solutions to the problems of our age?

Neighbouring news headlines this week offered a neat illustration of the media’s framing of the current situation. Representing the “moderates”, German chancellor Angela Merkel made a “passionate address” in which she denounced the outbreak of far-right protests in east Germany and reports of the “hunting down” of “foreigners” – asylum seekers and immigrants.

She observed: “There is no excuse or explanation for rabble-rousing, in some cases the use of violence, Nazi slogans, hostility towards people who look different, to the owner of a Jewish restaurant, attacking police.”

Ostensibly pitted against Merkel, is Viktor Orban, Hungary’s “extreme right” prime minister. Hungary risks being stripped of its voting rights in the European Union because of Orban’s “rabble-rousing” policies and his anti-migrant agenda.

Shortly before the European parliament voted against Hungary, accusing its government of posing a “systematic threat” to democracy and the rule of law, Orban argued that his country was being targeted for preferring not to be “a country of migrants”.

He is far from an outlier. Several other EU states, from Italy to Poland, are close behind Orban in pursuing populist, anti-immigrant agendas.

Family feud

But does this civil war in Europe really reflect a divide between good and bad politics, between moderates and extremists? Are we not witnessing something else: the internal contradictions brought to the fore by a turbo-charged neoliberalism that is now so ideologically entrenched that no one dares question its suitability, let alone its morality?

In truth, the row between Merkel and Orban is a family feud, between sister and brother wedded to the same self-destructive ideology but in profound disagreement about which placebo should be administered to make them feel better.

What do I mean?

Merkel and the mainstream neoliberal elite are committed to an ever-more deregulated world because that is imperative for a globalised economic elite searching to accrue ever more wealth and power. That elite needs open borders and a lack of significant regulation so that it can plunder unrestricted the Earth’s resources – human and material – while dumping the toxic waste byproducts wherever is most profitable and convenient.

In practice, that means creating maximum damage in places and against life-forms that have the least capacity to defend themselves: the poorest countries, the animal kingdom, the forests and oceans, the weather system – and, of course, against future generations that have no voice. There is a reason why the deepest seabeds are now awash with our plastic debris, poisoning and killing marine life for decades, maybe centuries, to come.

Interestingly, this global elite makes a few exceptions to its policy of entirely open borders and sweeping deregulation. Through its pawns in the world’s leading capitals – the people we mistakenly think of as our political representatives – it has created small islands of opacity in which it can stash away its wealth. These “offshore tax havens” are highly regulated so we cannot see what goes on inside them. While the elite wants borders erased and the free movement of workers to set one against the other, the borders of these offshore “safe deposit boxes” are stringently preserved to protect the elite’s wealth.

International order

Meanwhile, the global elite has created international or trans-national structures and institutions precisely to remove the power of nation-states to regulate and dominate the business environment. The political class in the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Mexico or Brazil do not control the corporations. These corporations control even the biggest states. The banks are too big to fail, the arms manufacturers too committed to permanent war to rein in, the largely uniform narratives of the corporate media too powerful to dissent from.

Instead, global or trans-national institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, NATO, BRICS and many others, remake our world to promote the globalised profits of the corporations.

The United Nations – a rival international project – is more problematic. It was created immediately after the Second World War with the aim of imposing a law-based international order, premised on respect for human rights, to prevent future large-scale wars and genocide. In practice, however, it chiefly serves the interests of the dominant western states through their capture of the Security Council, effectively the UN’s executive.

A few UN institutions – those in charge of human rights and prosecuting war crimes – that have the potential to restrain the power of the global elite find themselves ever more marginalised and undermined. Both the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court have been under sustained assault from US officials, both before and after Donald Trump became president.

Towards the abyss

The internal contradictions of this globalised system – between the unfettered enrichment of the elite and the endless resource depletion of the Earth and its weakest inhabitants – are becoming ever more apparent. Historically, the toxic waste from this system was inflicted on the poorest regions first, like puddles forming in depressions in the ground during a rainstorm.

As the planet has warmed, crops have failed, the poor have gone hungry, wars have broken out. All of this has been an entirely predictable outcome of the current economics of endless, carbon-based growth, coupled with resource theft. But unlike puddles, the human collateral damage of this economic system can get up and move elsewhere. We have seen massive population displacements caused by famines and wars, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. These migrations are not about to stop. They are going to intensify as neoliberalism hurtles us towards the economic and climate abyss.

The political class in the west are now experiencing profound cognitive dissonance. Merkel and the “moderates” want endless growth and a world without borders that is bringing gradual ruination on their economies and their privileges. They have no answers for the “extremists” on the right, who acknowledge this ruination and say something needs to be done urgently about it.

Orban and the far-right want to fiercely resurrect the borders that globalisation erased, to build barriers that will stop the puddles merging and inundating their higher ground. This is why the right is resurgent. They, far more than the moderates, can describe our current predicament – even if they offer solutions that are positively harmful. They want solid walls, national sovereignty, blocks on immigrants, as well as racism and violence against the “foreigners” already inside their borders.

The system is broken

We have to stop thinking of these political debates as between the good “moderates” and the nasty “extreme right”. This is a fundamental misconception.

The deluded “moderates” want to continue with a highly unsustainable form of capitalism premised on an impossible endless growth. It should be obvious that a planet with finite resources cannot sustain infinite growth, and that the toxic waste of our ever-greater consumption will poison the well we all depend on.

The west’s deluded far-right, on the other hand, believe that they can stand guard and protect their small pile of privilege against the rising tide of migrants and warming oceans caused by western policies of resource theft, labour exploitation and climate destruction. The far-right’s views are no more grounded in reality than King Canute’s.

Both sides are failing to grasp the central problem: that the western-imposed global economic system is broken. It is gradually being destroyed from within by its own contradictions. The “moderates” are doubly blind: they refuse to acknowledge either the symptoms or the cause of the disease. The “extremists” are as oblivious to the causes of the illness besetting their societies as the “moderates”, but they do at least recognise the symptoms as a sign of malaise, even if their solutions are entirely self-serving.

Squaring the circle

This can be seen in stark fashion in the deep divide over Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, so-called Brexit, which has cut across the usual left-right agendas.

The Remain crowd, who want to stay in Europe, believe Britain’s future lies in upholding the failed status quo: of a turbo-charged neoliberalism, of diminishing borders and the free movement of labour, of distant, faceless technocrats making decisions in their name.

Like a child pulling up the blanket to her chin in the hope it will protect her from the monsters lurking in the darkness of the bedroom, the “moderates” assume European bureaucrats will protect them from economic collapse and climate breakdown. The reality, however, is that the EU is one of the trans-national institutions whose chief rationale is accelerating our rush to the abyss.

Meanwhile, the Brexit crowd think that, once out of the EU, a small island adrift in a globalised world will be able to reclaim its sovereignty and greatness. They too are going to find reality a terrifying disappointment. Alone, Britain will not be stronger. It will simply be easier prey for the US-headquartered global elite. Britain will be jumping out of the EU frying pan into the flames of the Atlanticists’ stove.

What is needed is not the “moderates” or the “extreme right”, not Brexit or Remain, but an entirely new kind of politics, which is prepared to shift the paradigm.

The new paradigm must accept that we live in a world that requires global solutions and regulations to prevent climate breakdown. But it must also understand that people are rightly distrustful of distant, unaccountable institutions that are easily captured by the most powerful and the most pitiless. People want to feel part of communities they know, to have a degree of control over their lives and decisions, to find common bonds and to work collaboratively from the bottom-up.

The challenge ahead is to discard our current self-destructive illusions and urgently find a way to solve this conundrum – to square the circle.

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For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.