Apocalypse, Not Now, But Soon!

Fair Observer

SUBSCRIBE / INVITE FRIENDS / BROWSER

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

Peter Isackson

Chief Strategy Officer

~~~~ANNOUNCEMENT~~~~

Our website’s comment feature is soon going live!

Donors and writers will have automatic access to this feature. If you want to comment and support free, fair and independent nonprofit journalism, please sign up as a recurring donor for as little as $11 per year.
~~~~

Dear FO° Reader,

2024 is nearly drawing to a close. For Americans, next week’s Thanksgiving celebration marks the beginning of an inexorable cycle of events that now includes:

Black Friday shopping.
Several weeks to display the joyous “holiday spirit” (formerly, the “Christmas spirit” and, for some, Advent) mainly by more shopping and occasionally imbibing eggnog.
And finally, New Year’s Eve, which enables us to erase from memory the trials and tribulations of the expiring year.

I have to acknowledge that this sequence of events seems very remote to me after half a century living in France. We don’t have Thanksgiving. (Some might say that we have nothing to give thanks for.) Christmas has become a largely Americanized version of Noël. True, promotions with the prestigious Black Friday label have miraculously polluted our media in recent years. Still, we have no stores resembling America’s omnipresent Walmarts, Best Buys or Targets that lend themselves to staging scenes of extreme violence conducted by hordes of enraged bargain-hunters. So, this feast day of consumer folly simply doesn’t have the same meaning over here.

The concatenation of programmed year-end rituals has long had a tranquilizing effect on citizens in the high-strung modern US consumer economy. But this year, which has seen an exceptional rise in political tensions, promises to be very different. This is especially true in the US but also, by ricochet, across the globe. The humdrum Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s pantomime consisting largely of secular consumption-oriented activities has for once taken on a powerfully religious character. Much of the world and the entire US population is awaiting, with apprehension, the “Second Coming” — not of Christ (at least not for most people) but of Donald Trump.

Are these the political end times?

Many of our public figures appear ready to frame the current course of year-end events literally as the dawn of an apocalypse, if not THE Apocalypse. Democrats, for example, will continue — and probably amplify — their lamentations over the announced arrival of the Antichrist on January 20. Their media may expect to revert, in an aggravated form, to its habits acquired during Trump’s first term in the White House, when we were entertained by daily reports on the progress of Russiagate and endless hours of stale and repetitive late-night comedy. But the dramatic tone of anguish may be more authentic this time.

On the Republican side, it would be logical to assume that Trump nominee and fundamentalist Christian Mike Huckabee, who will soon take up his post in the Holy Land as ambassador to Israel, sees Israel’s current genocidal rampage across the “promised (but not yet quite delivered) land” as the anticipated prelude to the Rapture. For Huckabee and his fellow Christian Zionists, that forecast event marks the glorious moment when, the Jews having achieved their total control of Eretz Israel, Jesus in all his warrior majesty will descend upon them, sword in hand, and either convert them to the true Faith or exercise a campaign of ethnic cleansing on a scale that would put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to shame.

But one doesn’t have to be a believer. Even the secularists, who respect the separation of church and state, are at work implementing their version of the Apocalypse. With barely two months left of his term in office, US President Joe Biden has taken the bold step of authorizing Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russia with US missiles, a clear sign that he fears his successor may betray his promise to fight “as long as it takes.” Like Biden, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy worries that Trump may impose peace. He has described Biden’s weapons as the avenging angels of the Apocalypse: “The missiles,” he tells us, “will speak for themselves.”

Sitting here in the southwest of France, between La Rochelle and Bordeaux, it doesn’t yet quite feel like the Apocalypse. But the political events of this year in four places – Kyiv, Jerusalem, Paris and Washington — have sent a strong message. First, there are the two absurdly prolonged wars, one an enduring “special military operation,” the other an infinitely unfolding and exceptionally barbaric gesture of “self-defense.” Then, there is the fact that I was invited to vote in two “existential” democratic elections, one in France that took us by surprise and the other, programmed like clockwork but containing as many unexpected events as Hamlet’s buddy Horatio recounted in the final scene of the play (Hamlet, V.ii): “So shall you hear,” Horatio begins…

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts (two assassination attempts);
Of accidental judgments (e.g. the selection of Kamala Harris), casual slaughters (Gaza);
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause (too many to enumerate).
And in this upshot, purposes mistook (repeated “commitments” to ceasefires).

Electric elections?

2024 was announced as the year with the maximum number of elections, most of them supposedly democratic. I had a chance to vote in two of them. The one in France produced an expected result that seriously challenged the status quo in a country with a curiously crafted hybrid presidential-and-parliamentary political system. After being badly humiliated by the extreme right in the European parliamentary elections that took place on June 9, Jupiterian President Emmanuel Macron sought to confirm his Olympian stature by calling for a new general election in France. This time it was the left who humiliated him. His response, after a two-month Olympian “pause,” was to appoint as prime minister a member of the party that had literally the worst score of any “respectable” party, a whopping 5.7% of the vote.

What does that tell us about the state of democracy, or rather the way democratically elected leaders think of democracy?

I chose not to vote in the other election, the more fundamentally “existential” one that took place on November 5. Not that I wasn’t interested, and not that I reject the idea that voting for the “lesser of two evils” can be the right thing for citizens to do. I simply draw the line at the lesser of two Apocalypses.

Of course, there is another consideration, which also leaves people wondering about the democratic nature of US democracy. I could have voted in California, where I lived more than five decades ago. But, of course, my vote wouldn’t have mattered since California is blue, ergo not a battleground state.

Trump’s awaited second coming has now been heralded by the announcement of the names of his archangels: evocative names like Matt Gaetz, Marco Rubio, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and two dozen others. Each will wield a mighty sword that will either restore or destroy democracy unless Biden’s final apocalyptic move to inaugurate World War III by authorizing the use of long-range missiles against Russia offers him the same kind of reprieve that Zelenskyy benefitted from last May, when his term as president officially ended.

We should think about what all this tells us about the status of democracy in the world today. Zelenskyy’s US-backed war has made democratic elections supererogatory for a nation that claims to be fighting a war in the name of democracy. Who needs elections when there is a conflict to attend to? Netanyahu has waged a genocidal war to stay in power and out of prison. A clearly diminished Biden preferred to decimate his party in the vain hope of miraculously prolonging his reign as commander-in-chief by contesting an election he could not win. And now, by provoking Russia, could he be thinking that starting World War III would be the best and certainly most spectacular way to exit from the White House?

All those considerations tell me that Hamlet was right when he insisted that there was “something rotten in the state of Denmark” (and every one of today’s democracies). That sums up why I chose not to vote in the November election, apart from the consideration that clearly neither candidate seemed capable of understanding — or even seeking to understand — the world we live in today. Democracy has become little more than a game played by professional politicians schooled in defending specific agendas. It’s a complex game: seizing and then hanging on to power. Governing is the one thing such people have no time for.

Rethinking democracy

It is this state of affairs that has incited a Fair Observer project team based in France to launch an initiative designed, not to “save” our current version of democracy, but to provide the means of creating, within the field of media and journalism, an evolved culture of democracy that will be less tempted to veer into the logic of apocalyptic provocation. AI has its role to play, if we understand how to dialogue with it. That training in dialogue with AI may help us to cure our pathological failure to dialogue amongst ourselves.

In my column Outside the Box, last published earlier this week, I announced our call for collaboration in the preparation and drafting of a “manifesto for socially responsible AI and democracy.” We invite all who take an interest in such a project to join in the dialogue and research we are now undertaking. If you are interested or even just curious, please contact us at dialogue@fairobserver.com.

Sincerely,

Peter Isackson
Chief Strategy Officer

We are an independent nonprofit organization. We do not have a paywall or ads. We believe news must be free for everyone from Detroit to Dakar. Yet servers, images, newsletters, web developers and editors cost money.

So, please become a recurring donor to keep Fair Observer free, fair and independent.