The Wars Come Home
As Russia continues to grind down Ukraine and Israel does the same to Gazans, with heavy US involvement in both arenas, it’s worth remembering how tools used and lessons learned in theaters of combat typically find their way back to the US to be used on American citizens.
Much of the technology and methodology the US’ three-letter agencies use against Americans was developed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Police are constantly becoming more militarized and outfitted with tools from the battlefields. There are surveillance blimps, the FBI flies drones over the US, state and local police departments use Stingray – invasive cell phone surveillance devices that mimic cell phone towers and send out signals to trick cell phones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information.
The collection of Americans’ data was also pioneered in the “War on Terror.” From a 2013 story at HuffPost:
…essentially amassing everything, however minor or unimportant, and then using increasingly powerful computers to pull out of that large pile actionable information, i.e., specific information to feed back to combat commanders and special forces to allow them to kill specific people. Knowing, for example, the name of a guy’s girlfriend leads to knowing what car she drives which leads to knowing when she left home which leads to listening to her make a date via cell phone which leads a credit card charge for a room which leads to a strike on a particular location at a specific time, high-tech flagrante delicto.
The FBI has followed the NSA’s wartime lead in creating its Investigative Data Warehouse, a collection of more than a billion documents on Americans including intelligence reports, social security files, drivers’ licenses, and private financial information including credit card data.
It is unsurprising that these weapons and surveillance tools are turned on Americans. If we accept that the US is dominated by the transnational capital class, it stands to reason that its enemies have less to do with traditional nation-state boundaries and everything to do with resources and rent-seeking opportunities.
Attempting to secure capitalists’ interests at home and abroad is the mission. Since the conclusion of WWII the US has been all about spreading “freedom,” which means a state devoted to high profits – free from the political whims of local populations that could degrade an investment’s expected return.
But that plunder does not just exist in far flung regions; it’s also alive and well in the US as well and requires the same tools of population control and punishment.
At home, the war has always been raging too – which was again about freedom for the capitalist class. Workers, labor organizers, the Black Panthers were largely beaten into submission in a lopsided class war with capital and the state pitted against workers. After all, as J. Edgar Hoover argued, conflict abroad must mean subversion at home, but what does that mean when the US ruling class sides with neo-Nazis in Ukraine and authoritarian capitalists in Israel?
What Will the West Reap From Conflicts Involving Neo-Nazis in Ukraine and AI-Assisted “Plausible” Genocide in Gaza?
The US helped initiate and continues to perpetuate the conflict in Ukraine. And despite public urgings of caution, has fully backed Israel in its destruction of Gaza. At the same time, the crackdown on criticism of Israeli policy is intensifying in the US. Let’s look first at “tools” and then ideological creep.
There are reports that Israel is using an AI targeting system in Gaza with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties. On April 3, +972 Magazine revealed that the Israeli army was using a program known as “Lavender” to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. During the early stages of the conflict, the army almost completely relied on the system, which flagged as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
Silicon Valley is hard at work on similar tools for the US, and Ukraine has been used as a testing ground where the AI has but an utter failure. Project Maven is a Department of Defense program to use artificial intelligence to help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield using drone footage and other data.
As the New York Times reported on April 23, it is being used in Ukraine to “collect Russian movements and communications into one big, user-friendly picture, employing algorithms to predict where troops are moving and where attacks might happen.”
While the AI might be a nice shiny toy, it doesn’t work that well when your drones are quickly blown out of the sky and you can’t produce enough shells to match the Russian side. The Times goes on to admit numerous failures of this technology in Ukraine, but what goes unmentioned is how it will likely find its way into use back in the US.
Police drones are already widely used to monitor public gatherings in the US where there’s no risk that the Russians will shoot them out of the sky. The US adopting Israel technology that has been tested on the captive population of Gaza is nothing new. Here’s just a brief overview of some of the weaponized tech used in the occupied territories that has also been adopted in the US.
One example is how Israeli surveillance company Cellebrite sells its phone-hacking tools to countless police departments across the US. Antony Loewenstein in The Palestine Laboratory points out how Israelis complain that any Washington criticism of Israeli policies ignores how much the US has benefitted from its “combat laboratory” for US weapon development. And another example:
Some Americans are keen to learn on the ground in the Jewish state itself before taking it back to their home countries. In 2004, the US-based pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a self-described civil rights organization, began sending US police delegations to Israel…The US police who went “come back and they are Zionists. They understand Israel and its security needs in ways a lot of audiences don’t.”
How commonplace are such systems in the US? Database that aims to collect information on every Palestinian. They then use it to restrict movement or potentially other freedoms. The monitoring of Palestinians 24/7 across the occupied territory can turn up personal details that an individual wishes to remain secret, e.g., a married man who might be gay, someone who might be having an affair, etc. That information, as well as any other embarrassing activities, can then be used to try to turn that person into a spy or pressure them in other ways.
These same technologies are used in the US and elsewhere. Take Oosto, formerly AnyVision. It’s an Israeli company that merges AI with facial recognition and biometrics and targets all Palestiniians across the West Bank. According to Loewenstein, Oosto operates in the US, and in locations such as casinos, manufacturing, and even fitness centers.”
And there’s Cellebrite, the Israeli digital intelligence behemoth whose products include the Universal Forensic Extraction Device hacking tool. According to Loewenstein:
Over 2,800 US government customers, including law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, and the Department of Agriculture, have purchased the company’s equipment, and the firm has hired prosecutors, police officers, and Secret Service agents to train people to use it. The company has announced that it has secured business with six of the world’s biggest oil refiners and six of the planet’s largest pharmaceutical firms. It has also moved into the increasingly profitable field of corporate surveillance.
Protecting Plunder
I think it sometimes gets lost in all the madness of Project Ukraine just how important it was that Stanford hosted neo-Nazis last year:
The university is, after all, the intellectual center of the US capitalist citadel of Silicon Valley that increasingly dominates the military-industrial complex. The Nazism fostered in Ukraine by the West was unlikely to ever remain confined to Ukraine, and there are already signs it is beginning to spread throughout Europe. Here’s Kit Klarenberg writing at Al Mayadeen:
In mid-February, Berlin’s Junge Welt revealed how Centuria, an ultra-violent Ukrainian Neo-Nazi faction, has since the war in Ukraine cemented itself in six cities across Germany, and is seeking to expand its activities across Europe, influencing populations and governments to adopt their horrendous worldview. Disturbingly, they’re not the only fascist militants from Kiev with major political and societal ambitions, going under the name of Centuria. As we shall see, there are strong indications the latter is the monstrous offspring of British intelligence.
Centuria’s activities are outlined in a detailed report from George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES). It notes that the group’s parent organisation is a “self-described order of ‘European traditionalist’ military officers that has the stated goals of reshaping the country’s military along right-wing ideological lines, and defending the ‘cultural and ethnic identity’ of European peoples against ‘Brussels’ politicos and bureaucrats’”:
“[Centuria] envisions a future where ‘European right forces are consolidated and national traditionalism is established as the disciplining ideological basis for the European peoples.’”
IERES reported that Centuria’s military wing began training in 2018 in Ukraine’s Hetman Petro Sahaidachny National Army Academy (NAA), Kiev’s “premier military education institution and a major hub for Western military assistance to the country.” From there, many of the group’s members were drilled by top Western military institutions alongside British, Canadian and American special forces officers. In turn, its operatives traveled to Western military training centres, spreading Neo-Nazism every step of the way.
If you’re going to back Nazis in Ukraine in order to weaken Russia, why would such a strategy stop with Ukraine? Why not Armenia, Poland, or the Baltics? Or how about Germany? Maybe even in the US?
The fact that Stanford welcomed Nazis with open arms should not have come as a surprise, as described here by WSWS:
Such a development can only be explained based on an analysis of the class forces on campus and the foul intellectual climate that has been created by decades of anti-Marxism and the promotion of postmodernist thought.
The last thirty years of uninterrupted imperialist wars abroad and social counter-revolution at home that followed the end of the USSR also saw the ever closer integration of academic institutions, especially the so called “elite” universities, into the state and military apparatus and Wall Street.
Stanford University is a primary example. The university’s Board of Trustees is largely composed of hedge fund managers and Wall Street executives, including Gene T. Sykes, the managing director of Goldman Sachs. The university has also long been notorious for the right-wing Hoover Institution, which is currently led by war criminal Condoleezza Rice, a key figure in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The Hoover Institution has historically been a central hub for the promotion of right-wing historical revisionism and falsifications. Most notably, it has hosted workshops with far-right academics like Jörg Baberowski from Berlin’s Humboldt University, who has since emerged as a central figure in the international effort by academics to minimize the crimes of Nazism.
The Hoover Institution, following in the footsteps of the former president it is named for, has also always played a guiding role in the class warfare waged by capitalists – both at home and abroad. A 1978 Palo Alto meeting yielded much of the Reagan administration leadership and the Hoover Institution played a major role in the plan for the 1980s. Bush the Younger had a similar meeting in 1998.
Where the US-backed conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and celebration of neo-Nazis at Stanford merge is at the intersection of plunder and authoritarianism. The driving force behind the war in Ukraine is a desire by the Western elite to restart the pillaging of Russia that began during the 1990s shock therapy and was largely ended by Putin.
On the other hand, Israel is really a perfect model state for the US ruling elite, summed up here in Antony Lowenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory:
According to Netanyahu, Jewish writer Peter Beinhart explained, “the future belonged…to authoritarian capitalism: governments that combined aggressive and often racist nationalism with economic and technological might.”
The question then becomes, would the transnational capitalist have any hesitation going from “Mussolini style corporatism” to full blown Fascism before relinquishing any of their ill-gotten gains or accepting limits on their power or reach?
Just how far along the US is in the process of becoming more like Israel is debatable, but the vision is clear. Neve Gordon, who teaches international law and human rights at Queen Mary University in London, tells Loewenstein that the Israeli model is based on describing itself as a democracy, effectively surveilling and killing “terrorists,” and simultaneously advancing neoliberal economic objectives. The following passage describes Israel, but if it was referring to the US, would you be able to tell the difference?
This attraction stems from the sense (real or perceived) that fighting terrorism through methods of homeland security, that include suspending due process in many areas of the criminal justice system, including torture, the right to a speedy trial, the freedom from arbitrary police searches, and the prohibition against indefinite incarceration and incognito detentions (to mention a few methods) does not conflict with democratic values. Thus, the ultimate attractiveness towards the Israeli experience in fighting terrorism is to its ability to link a militaristic worldview with a neoliberal economic agenda.
Anything that gets in the way of that worldview is now being dismantled. Maureen Clare Murphy at Electronic Intifada goes into meticulous detail in this April 11 pieceon all the ways the US is gutting international law in Palestine. That’s not new for the “rules-based international order” where the rules are whatever they say they are, but the point is being driven home clearly in Gaza and elsewhere. Here’s just one recent example from the “Newspaper of Record”:
It is not. The West’s backing of Israel is reminiscent of more overt forms of colonialism and resource theft. As the the Western oligarchs are increasingly thwarted in turf wars in Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere,
This will likely lead to even more violent rapaciousness at home, but how much more juice remains in the squeeze?
Elsewhere, any weak state sitting on valuable real estate should be even more nervous than usual. Because what we’re seeing with Israel and the West’s support is the culmination of decades of increasing disregard for and rewriting of international law. They are now completely tearing it up and essentially saying, “Anything goes.”
What could this mean? Let’s just quickly take the case of Niger as an example because it has been in the news a lot in recent months. The impoverished country has some of the highest grade uranium ore deposits in the world. It has been mined for decades by the French, who got a massive discount in its former colony on fuel for their nuclear plants. The US also has a major drone base in the country.
Well, Niger has decided that not only would the cushy deal for the French end, but the Americans would be kicked out as well. The Americans, however, are not leaving,. If we apply the Israel-Gaza doctrine, could France or the US respond to an attack on their troops or civilians by leveling the country and simply stealing the uranium? No doubt the US has already been engaged in similar efforts in recent decades, but could we see a more brutal doubling down in coming years?
Frederic Lordon, writing from the French perspective, believes that Gaza represents a clear historical marker:
What we are witnessing is moral suicide. Never before has there been such a colossal squandering of symbolic capital that was thought to be unassailable, which had been built up in the wake of the Holocaust. It turns out that the time for symbolic reckoning is coming for everyone, especially for this colonial project which calls itself the West and claims a monopoly on civilisation, yet wages violence in the name of its principles. If indeed they ever floated, its moral credentials are now sunk. It takes the arrogance of the soon-to-be-fallen rulers, who don’t yet know it, to believe that they can pursue this course without cost. Those who remain passive, who participate as accomplices, even acting as deniers of such an enormous crime being committed before their eyes and before the eyes of everyone else – people of this kind can no longer lay claim to anything. The whole world is watching Gaza die, and the whole world is watching the West watching Gaza. And nothing escapes them.
At this point, we inevitably think of Germany, whose unconditional support has reached astonishing levels of delirium, and of which one darkly humorous Internet user was able to say: ‘When it comes to genocide, they are always on the wrong side of History’. It’s not certain that ‘we’ – France – are much better off, but it is certain that History is waiting for everyone around the corner. History: this is what the West meets in Gaza. If, as there is reason to believe, this is a rendezvous with decline and fall, then the time will come when we will be able to say that the world was upturned in Gaza.
While the decline has been widely acknowledged for some time, much of the concern has centered around which form it would take. What Ukraine and Gaza announce is that the process will be a protracted, bloody mess.
If Western governments, representing their oligarchic benefactors, are no longer interested in international law and no longer capable of agreements, the path has been laid. The precedent is being set, and the long term consequences are here: