Ceasefires
It has been a feature of sociopathic cruel Israeli exceptionalism for a very long time that ceasfires don't mean anything; the Israels have never stopped bombing Gaza, and hundreds more have died. There is always some excuse, usually that a Hamas person is hiding in a hospital or under a town. Of course Hamas never officially surrendered, but who is left to surrender? Even if they had, I am sure that Israel would merely claim that surrender was a lie, and there was still provocation, and keep right on bombing.
That is also the way Putin works in Ukraine, and seems likely to be the new genre for the United States as well.
One theory of why apes never developed language is that it never became an ESS--an evolutionary stable strategy-- for them to tell each other the truth, so what did they need language for? That raises the question, what Messrs. Netanyahu, Putin and Trump need language for?
Victory
There is an extraordinary scene at the end of Philip K. Dick's alternate history novel, Man in the High Castle. Juliana Frink has been used, manipulated, by an undercover Nazi, who is trying to normalize himself and to present her as a distraction, to get to the famous antifascist author, Hawthorne Abendsen, so he can kill him. Hawthorne's viral underground novel portrays a world in which the Nazis and Japanese lost World War II. Julia finally understands what is happening, enters a sort of fugue state, and cuts the killer's throat in their hotel room. She then goes ahead with the planned visit to Abendsen, who, hearing what she has done, says in a very strangely complimentary Phildickian fashion, that Juliana "is a daemon... A little cthonic spirit...roam[ing] tirelessly over the face of the earth". What I want to be when I grow up. They cast the I Ching together, and get the hexagram "Inner Truth". Abendsen says, even rather angrily: "It means, does it, that my book is true?....Germany and Japan lost the war?"
How could the murderous entities who, in the novel, dominate the two ends of the continent have lost the war? I have always believed because, in Thoreau's terms, they had become the tools of their tools, and that they were now the slaves of what they had conquered, staggering under it like the Rodin figure with the huge stone on his back, sick and barely carrying it any more, frightened of fading from history like fog; and knowing that Juliana and Hawthorne, are as free as their captors are enslaved.
That is where I think we are in our world: I believe we have won this. It is a strange, and I sometimes think delusional, certainty, at a time when the people of Gaza are still suffering and dying; Americans, only a few so far it is true, are dying in the Iran war for absolutely nothing; compassionate smart people were killed in confrontations with ICE not long ago; Trump is experimenting with prosecuting people for being "antifa", barely an Egregious Ontological Error because the category...doesn't exist. (Does that make it "meta-Ontological"?)
Yet I glow with an inner serene certainty: We have got this.
A Fascism Fail
I had another epiphany recently, that the reason Trump's attempted fascism will fade like fog (good alliteration, ha) is through an amusing failure of the Stupid Voter Project. I figured out years ago that, rather than creating the fair, thoughtful, independent, assertive voters who would be needed to sustain a democracy for a thousand years, both parties (but especially the Republicans) have spent the last two centuries making voters who can easily be tricked. But I flash, at 1:37 a.m. on an insomniac Saturday, that they did it the wrong way. They needed to create dumb, angry, loyal, committed warhorses that Donald Trump could ride to victory; instead, they did the much easier and less expensive job, of making unbearably light, easily distracted people who can never finish a project, in large part because they cannot even remember what they started. Omigod, they needed to create Wells' Morlocks, but they made the Eloi instead, ha! It is a fascism of blades of grass, and Donald Trump himself...wait for it...is Eloi.
Good night....
"And that," said Beetlejuice, "is why I won't do two shows a night any more...Nope...won't do it."