Understanding Power Dynamics & Moving Beyond Divisions: Covid19, Ukraine & Israel/Palestine
Dr Piers Robinson & Vanessa Beeley
This piece – originally published by UKColumn – challenges the position of OffG (and others) on the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel.
The position of the authors is that what we might call “traditional” geopolitics remains a vital topic for the alternate media, and that multipolarity continues to represent a positive alternative to Western Imperialism.
In the interest of fairness we will publishing this and a response by Iain Davis and Catte Black simultaneously.
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The last four years has been a significant shakeup for some people. Many of those previously identifying as ‘of the left’ have started to wonder what that actually means. At the same time, we have seen a willingness by those usually associated with ‘the right’ becoming more open to engaging with ‘left wing’ voices.
The high profile ‘lefty’ British comedian Russell Brand interacting with ‘right wing’ Tucker Carlson, and finding common ground, symbolises these ideological shifts.
The Covid–19 event has played a major role here. The draconian response to a purported health emergency involved propaganda operations aimed at maximising fear levels amongst the population and extreme measures including lockdowns and the mandating of experimental gene therapy injections.
As these biosecurity regimes were being trialled across countries, major harm was being done. The resulting ‘collateral damage’ (a euphemism originating during Gulf War 1 designed to obfuscate the fact that civilians were being killed by US bombs) includes significant economic damage to middle- and low-income people and associated small businesses, severe damage to populations in poorer countries, disruption of normal health care routines resulting in missed diagnoses and worsening general physical and mental health, an increase in depression and related suicides, and sharp increases in excess mortality across multiple countries.
Broadly, those identifying as ‘of the left’ have supported official narratives regarding Covid–19. In particular, a perception emerged early on that right wing governments (e.g. the Trump administration in the US and the Johnson Conservative government in the UK) were failing to protect their populations from the alleged Covid–19 threat. As a result, criticism from left-wing politicians frequently demanded even harsher and quicker measures and presented this as a moral imperative based upon concern for community and solidarity.
Relatively few left-wing critics were insightful enough to challenge the devastating impact policies such as lockdown were having on the poorer strata of society and the Global South in countries that adopted these policies. Opposition, what we in this article recognise as the ‘Covid resistance’, more often emerged from the right of the political spectrum and was frequently couched in terms of the protection of individual rights and bodily ‘autonomy’. Within this group there was a good deal of analysis challenging the ‘The Science’.
The escalation in 2022 of the conflict in Ukraine, and now the Israeli military action against Palestinians, introduce new dynamics. In recognition that conflict in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and West Asia (alias the Middle East) is being driven by Western geo-political ambitions, not least of which concerns attempts to maintain US-led dominance of the global system, dissent from left-wing anti-imperialists has been prominent.
Conversely, at least some of the existing right-dominated Covid resistance has adopted either an ambiguous or otherwise outrightly supportive position toward Western policy regarding Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. Within these cleavages, a key subdivision concerns diverging perspectives within the Covid resistance between those who emphasise the continuing drive toward technocratic global governance and those who focus upon the weakening/declining Western Empire and the rise of a multipolar global system.
Looking across the last four years and the ‘rolling thunder’ of events, as Professor Mark Crispin Miller has described them, from Covid–19 through Ukraine to Israel/Palestine, there are at least two processes in play and which can be linked to two distinct power axes.
The first process concerns the concentration of power enabled by the Covid–19 ‘structural deep event’ (Scott) and which has involved global-level actors variously helping to realise, or otherwise promote, a deceptive impression that an entirely novel and particularly dangerous pathogen started circulating the globe in late 2019 and early 2020.
As well as multiple governments being involved in the construction of this ‘pandemic’—in particular, the US, China, UK and Germany/EU—international organisations such as the UN and WHO, plus influential think tanks like the WEF as well as powerful banking and financial actors, all played central roles.
As such, the power axis involved with the Covid–19 event has a distinctly international, or global, dimension to it. In addition to the draconian responses to the constructed health crisis, we are now witnessing an attempt to consolidate the biosecurity regimes trialled during the early phases of the Covid–19 event.
As many analysts are pointing out, the Pandemic Preparedness Agenda (PPA) and International Health Regulations (IHR) are being used to enable organisations, principally the World Health Organisation (WHO), to exert influence over decisions to control populations during declared health emergencies.
This emerging biosecurity architecture is complemented by a parallel drive toward more organised and enforceable censorship regimes. Here, Taibbi et al. have documented the so-called Censorship Industrial Complex whilst there are multiple drives to pass through bills that will create a legal backing for control of alleged ‘disinformation’; see for example, the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK Online Safety legislation.
The combined effect of these health and information control architectures will be the coercion of populations into accepting ‘health measures’ and the stifling of public debate and dissent. All of this represents highly organised propaganda aimed at shaping material and informational realms in order to ‘organise conduct’ and mould beliefs. For a significant number of those in the right-dominated Covid resistance, this process reflects the globalist technocratic agenda and one that is propelling us into a globalised technocratic order.
The second process in play is the continued projection of power by the US and its allies; witness the current wars in Ukraine and West Asia (Middle East). Compared to the Covid–19 event, this process is more easily located within the power axis of the Western Empire, in particular the so-called military-industrial complex (MIC).
Western imperialism obviously pre-dates the Covid–19 event, and the belligerence accompanying it arguably spans centuries. In terms of recent history, the 9/11 structural deep event represents the start of the most recent phase of the West’s attempt to exert influence through military means.
The evidence in support of 9/11 itself being a self-inflicted wound, a manufactured war trigger primarily designed to enable the conditions for a series of regime-change wars under cover of a Western-led global ‘war on terror’, is now overwhelming. Its utilisation as a propaganda narrative designed to underpin multiple regime change wars is also well established.
The initial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by ‘regime-change’ drives in Libya and Syria, have segued into the Ukraine proxy war against Russia and the current support for Israel as it carries out a publicly declared genocidal military operation in Gaza whilst simultaneously targeting Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese and Iranian Resistance factions.
For many analysts, this extraordinary level of belligerence demonstrates the increasing isolation of the Western Empire and, indeed, its declining hegemony. In both military and economic terms, the West has been unable to prevail in the Ukraine and is now facing strategic failure.
In terms of ideational power, levels of global support for the Palestinians, as Western-backed and the British incubated Zionist project conducts a military campaign which meets the criteria of genocide, suggest that whatever credibility the West possessed in the past is now being further, perhaps catastrophically, eroded.
Certainly, at this stage in the history of the Western US-led empire, it is very difficult to imagine there being sufficient military, economic or ideational capacity necessary to ‘win’ in the Ukraine or the Middle East, let alone engage any other major powers.
Five points follow from this description of what is going on.
First, both processes are real meaning that, quite simply, both Western global military adventurism and drives toward the creation of global governance structures are empirically demonstrable. We can observe them in the proxy military engagements seen in the Ukraine and Gaza, the dystopian experience during Covid–19, and the formulation of legislative frameworks surrounding pandemic preparedness and control of ‘disinformation’. In addition, these processes are occurring simultaneously.
Second, we cannot be sure, at present, of the relationship between the two processes and the two power axes. One possibility is that both processes have a shared global-level origin and that the power axes are more or less aligned. In this scenario the same elite power networks—broadly a network of global technocratic elite groups—are responsible for fuelling both the wars and the biosecurity regimes.
Another possibility is that whilst there are shared interests across elite power blocks with respect to the development and implementation of biosecurity regimes, there are also divergent material and security interests. In this scenario, we see major powers such as the US, China and Russia pushing forward with the development of global biosecurity regimes whilst resource and security driven conflicts roll on.
Also possible is that, rather than emanating primarily from transnational-level elite power networks, both the wars and the biosecurity regimes are largely a function of Western-centric elite power networks with support from factions within opposing nations that have infiltrated governance and public institutions including media. From this perspective, both processes might be explicable as part of Western Imperialism. Detailed and global level power network analysis is essential in order to further assess the relative cogency of these possibilities as well as other plausible hypotheses.
Third, we can, however, be sure that both processes represent clear and present threats to the lives and well-being of people. The responses to the Covid–19 event—including lockdowns and coerced injections—have had a catastrophic impact on populations across the globe. There are grounds now to argue that many deaths attributed to Covid–19 were, in fact, iatrogenic (induced by the treatments and actions of medical professionals), whilst the impact of lockdowns and other societal-level disruptions have caused immense ‘collateral damage’.
According to some scientists, there is now overwhelming evidence that the injectable products marketed as a ‘cure’ to Covid are killing and maiming significant numbers of people and, indeed, excess mortality has remained very high throughout 2023.
The emerging biosecurity architecture described earlier—the Pandemic Preparedness Agenda and the Censorship Industrial Complex—threaten to enable yet further blows to the health of global populations. Western power projection through military means is also catastrophic. For example, the Watson Institute ‘Cost of War’ project recently estimated indirect deaths in post-9/11 war zones—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen—at 3.6 to 3.8 million people. Israeli military action in Gaza, since 7 October 2023, has killed over 20,000 people, at least 50% of them children.
Fourth, in order to try to protect people, both processes and power axes need to be resisted and, in doing so, we must avoid falling into the trap of dismissing resistance to Western Imperialism in places such as Gaza or Ukraine as distractions or otherwise unimportant. For Western-based writers and researchers, it is perhaps easier to engage with threats posed to their own lives and well-being and those of fellow Westerners.
This might create a propensity to prioritise critique of the Covid–19 event. But this should not be done at the expense of support for those at the receiving end of the Western Empire’s firepower in places such as Gaza and Syria. To state a simple but important example, in their current predicament the Palestinian people have priorities that need addressing that are more urgent than any emerging global-level political and economic structures. They are fighting for their existence in Palestine.
Indeed, one could argue there is a level of subliminal white supremacism in the argumentation that conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine or the wider West Asia region are little more than distractions that will facilitate the Western-centric dystopian governance regime.
There is a lack of cultural and historical context or understanding and a projection of Western values (or lack of them), which leads to what appears to be a narrow, myopic focus on the problems that will affect the collective West and nominally ‘civilised’ countries while excluding developing countries or those battling Western neocolonialist projects from the analysis. Is their war against oppression and tyranny of less value than the modern war that is being waged against the predator class vision of our future as humanity?
As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “You pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” Those who perceive Ukraine and Gaza as orchestrated distractions from the threat of a biosecurity state in the West live in the countries that have subjugated the Global South for centuries without respite unless those countries comply with US/UK-led demands and agendas. Resistance leads to Western-dominated plundering of resources and the decimation of culture, civilisation and infrastructure to ensure a developing country is reduced to a dark-age failed state.
There also appears to be little analysis of how people in so-called Global South nations actually feel about the global future or how they instinctively pivot towards the East, having suffered untold horrors at the hands of the West’s military-industrial complex for most of their existence.
Thus, the global cohesion to face a global enemy that threatens all our existence is lacking because of the tendency to literally balkanise discussion into sectors which find it almost impossible to identify areas where overlap is viable.
In other words, until we start to take full responsibility for the misery inflicted by historic strategies still supported today Western regimes, we will never address key root causes of world subjugation. While we address what we consider to be a universal dystopian future, we must also simultaneously address the liberation of the nations we have enabled our governments to prey upon, destroy, rape and plunder. We can’t fight dystopia while dismissing, marginalising or ignoring those already living in it.
The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realise that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests, and in knowing who their enemies are. The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organised, protected robbery.
Franz Fanon
Fifth, recognising that we are up against multiple processes and power axes provides an opportunity for those who perceive themselves to be as ‘of the left’ or ‘of the right’ to rally around a common principle that is to prioritise protecting people against corrupt elites power networks.
Primarily this requires some of the right-orientated Covid resistance to become more fully conversant with the realities of Western imperialism and, at the same time, some of the left-orientated anti-imperialists to wake up to the threats posed by the emerging biosecurity regimes.
At present, the most bitter pill needing to be swallowed by some of the Covid resistance is acceptance of the fact that, whatever the causes and responsibilities surrounding 7 October, the reality is that Israel has played a central role in terms of Western power projection in the Middle East and, as part of this, a terrible injustice has been committed against Palestinians.
A prime example of the schism between the Covid resistance and endorsement of Israel and US neocolonialist designs on the Middle East can be identified in statements from vaccine-opposed Robert Kennedy Jr. and his pivot to “unconditional” support for what is effectively a US military garrison in the Middle East:
Israel is critical and the reason it’s critical is because it is a bulwark for us in the Middle East. It is almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. It is our oldest ally, it’s been our ally for 75 years. It has been an incredible ally for us in terms of the technology exchange and building the Iron Dome which we have paid a lot for—has taught us enormously about how to defend ourselves against missile attack. That military expenditure—75% goes to US companies under the agreement, under the MoU.
If you look at what’s happening in the Middle East now, the closest allies to Iran are Russia and China. Iran also controls all of Venezuela’s oil, Hezbollah is in Venezuela, they have propped up the Maduro regime and so they control that oil supply. BRICS, Saudi Arabia is now joining BRICS so those countries will control 90% of the oil in our world. If Israel disappears, the vacuum in the Middle East, Israel is our Ambassador, our beachhead in the ME, it gives us ears and eyes in the ME, it gives us intelligence, the capacity to influence affairs in the ME. If Israel disappeared Russia and China would be controlling the ME and would control 90% of the world’s oil supply and that would be cataclysmic for US national security.
The war, whether Western-centric or transnational, is against the vulnerable and the disenfranchised of this world—it is impossible to fight a successful campaign against the threat that confronts humanity without collaboration with all oppressed peoples of the world. For the Global South to be liberated from the chains of Western oppression must be a priority to achieve a world united against an oligarchical tyranny, wherever it emanates from.
Moving Beyond Left-Right and the partitioning of analysis sectors
All that is required here is a willingness to acknowledge and engage with the overwhelming evidence we now have that both Western imperial belligerence and nefarious biosecurity regimes are bad for health, autonomy and freedom. Both need to be resisted, and resisted in a way that does not eclipse one or the other.
Common ground can be found through recognition of the power axes in play and the ways in which they exploit, suppress and harm people albeit in different ways and places. Recognition that the problem common to both is the existence of demonstrably corrupt and unrepresentative power elites should be enough to alert people who perceive themselves as ‘left’ or ‘right’ that we all share a common enemy.
It is also probably time for people to abandon the left-right paradigm. As suggested in this article, the divisions and blind spots which the left-right paradigm, respectively, enables and reveals mean that it has probably outlived its usefulness. This evolution will require further concerted thinking with respect to new ways of comprehending and analysing our political universe.
This article is just a start. For now it is enough to recognise that, given the nefarious power axes with which we are having to do battle, our existing political structures are profoundly broken. As noted by Dr Julie Ponesse, fired for refusing the Covid injection:
…our institutions are broken beyond repair. It’s time to build anew: a new economy, a new way of governing, and a new health care system.
Another way of putting this is that if we had anything approaching a functioning democracy or system that genuinely represented the popular consensus, we would not have to endure a state of perpetual war undeniably facilitated by state-managed lies and deception on an epic scale. We would not be on the abyss of a biosecurity world coup that threatens us all with a future of colonisation under the control of forces that effectively occupy our governments.
If anyone doubts the crossover between the genocide that Israel is inflicting upon the seventy-five-year-occupied and persecuted Palestinian people and the incoming biosecurity/surveillance agenda, please take a look at the 2030 Roadmap for UK-Israel Bilateral Relations.
This document lays out the involvement that Israel will have in the future of British healthcare, defence and security, climate issues, trade and investment, cyber, culture, education and higher education, science, innovation and technology. In other words, what originated as a British settler-colonialist project in Palestine after the Balfour Treaty of 1917 will now apparently occupy and influence the essential decision-making processes of British society. From the document:
The vision for our 2 nations also includes health cooperation. We will explore the development of a dialogue between the UK and Israel to address the challenges faced by our healthcare systems, and building on the launch of the pan-Northern UK-Israel health-tech gateway earlier this year. We will also collaborate in order to materialise a pilot program in the north-east of England, which will focus on digital health, telemedicine and expanding health cooperation focus on those areas and other tailor made Israeli technological solutions. Our ambition for closer, mutually beneficial ties is limitless.
In the final analysis, it is important to recognise the scale of the struggle we face. We are living through unusually dangerous and tumultuous times. For some, this means being on the receiving end of hard military power. The threat of regional escalation in the Middle East is very real as we enter 2024.
For many others, lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by the predator classes as populations reel from the deleterious consequences of lockdowns, experimental gene therapy ‘vaccines’ and being terrorised by a pathogen, one that borders on being mythical. Solidarity is of utmost importance in this struggle and we need it now more than ever.
As the (sadly) late legendary journalist John Pilger so aptly said:
Rapacious great power is ruthless and vindictive; many of us can’t imagine because we’re not like that in our lives.
In order to face that great power and to dismantle the projects with which it intends to destroy the world as we know it, we must form a cohesive and united Resistance front, one which is inclusive of East and West and everything in between. We must move beyond the left-right paradigms and understand that the rapacious predator class has no such limits or partitioning restrictions on its strategy. Neither should we.
Dr Piers Robinson was Chair/Professor in Politics, Society and Political Journalism (University of Sheffield, 2016-19), Senior Lecturer in International Politics (University of Manchester, 2010-16) and Lecturer in Political Communication (University of Liverpool, 1999-05). He is co-Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Media and Propaganda and associated researcher with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 ‘Global War on Terror.
Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East – on the ground in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, while also covering the conflict in Yemen since 2015. Follow her on Twitter @VanessaBeeley, or read her blog at The Wall Will Fall.
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