In 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Scaling that up, 2024 was a year where a century happened.
The Sykes-Picot Accords that laid out the contours of the modern Middle East were signed in 1916. This year, 2024, they were overturned as the nation state of Syria was destroyed by a wolf pack of at least a dozen terrorist militias supported by Turkey, Israel, Qatar, and the United States. That is the definition of an epochal event.
It also reveals the U.S.’ preferred modus operandi in the world: its people won’t tolerate dead soldiers coming home in body bags, so it hires terrorist mercenaries to do its dirty work. Think of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua, ISIS after Iraq, Boko Haram in North Africa. But back to 2024 as the year that was a century…
In 1917, Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, penned the infamous Balfour Declaration, stating that the British Government viewed favorably the establishment of a homeland in Palestine for Jews. That endowment was actualized in 1948, when Zionist Jews seized 79% of Palestine and declared the establishment of Israel. But their ambition was always for more.
The century-old Zionist vision of Greater Israel will require taking Lebanon (underway), Syria (underway), most of Iraq (underway), Egypt east of the Nile, Jordan, and a large swath of Saudi Arabia. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotich, publicly calls for taking this “little by little.” As of 2024, there is no doubt that the process is well underway.
This follows as Israel revealed itself in 2024 to be a murderous, genocidal state, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent, defenseless Palestinians, most of them women and children, in order to steal their land. That is not even a judgement. It’s a clinical statement of fact.
In July, the British medical journal, Lancet, stated that “186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” By now, more than six months on, that number is much, much higher. It is the most conspicuous, public genocide since the Holocaust during World War II. That makes 2024 an all-the-more remarkable year.
The U.S.’ breathless, unrestrained support for the genocide marked a huge turning point for its reputation in the world. No more can it credibly claim to be a champion of human rights, a defender of Democracy, a supporter of international law. In 2024, the U.S. destroyed untold reputational capital it has spent centuries accumulating. It will never be recovered.
The year 2024 can also credibly be considered the start of World War III. Consider the eerie parallels to World War I, begun in 1914.
World War I occurred because Germany was overtaking Britain as the world’s leading industrial state. If Britain did not do something about it, it would be eclipsed as the global hegemon. Today, China plays Germany, blowing by the U.S.’ Britain.
In the lead-up to that first World War, the sides sorted themselves into blocs, the British, French, and Russians (joined, later, by the U.S.) forming one bloc, the Triple Entente. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed the other bloc, the Triple Alliance. Today, NATO and the West form one bloc; the Global South-based BRICS alliance, led by China and Russia, form the opposing bloc.
Finally, both wars were/are about who will control the oil-rich Middle East.
The Germans had befriended the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of what, at the time, was called “West Asia.” They had begun building the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railroad, which would have given them control of most of the world’s then-known oil. That posed a mortal threat to the British, who had just finished converting their global navy from running on coal to running on oil.
So, besides being the year that Sykes-Picot was undone, and in which Israel and the U.S. revealed their genocidal natures, 2024 will be remembered as the year in which World War III began. There was one more, important international matter in all of this.
Russia quit its former ally, Syria, leaving it to the mercies (such as they are) of the terrorist cabal that had beset it, in 2011. But, there was a quid pro quo: the U.S. could have Syria but it would close down its decades-long menacing of Russia through its U.S.-allied proxy, Ukraine. It is a good deal for both sides.
For the U.S., Ukraine has long been lost. It has long been out of money, weapons, and men. Now, the U.S. gets to cut those losses and refocus its sights on what it perceives as its real adversary, China. For Russia, it stops the bleed on its southern border. This, too, goes back over a century.
It was in 1919 that the U.S. invaded Russia to try to overturn the Russian Revolution. That White Counter-Revolution failed, and the U.S. and Russia remained bitter rivals for the next century. This current predation on Russia was carried out by Ukraine, with the U.S. as its puppeteer.
It was Bill Clinton who began moving NATO and its nuclear-tipped missiles right up to Russia’s borders. The U.S. knows very well the panic that results from such menacing, having lived through and survived the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So, not only has Russia defeated the U.S. militarily in Ukraine. It has defeated it economically, diplomatically, politically, and strategically as well. These are astonishing, highly damaging setbacks for the U.S. The U.S. public hasn’t gotten the memo, yet.
Economically? Remember when Joe Biden declared that “the strongest sanctions regime in the history of the world” would “reduce the ruble to rubble”? In fact, Russia’s economy has proven much stronger than the U.S. economy, growing faster, with lower inflation, and lower debt.
It has won diplomatically, as well. Most of the world’s nations refused to join the sanctions on Russia demanded by the U.S. government. And, the U.S. shot itself in the foot by stealing $300 billion of Russian assets held in Western banks. More nations will avoid dollars to prevent such banditry being carried out against them when they don’t bow to U.S. dictates.
Russia won politically, too. A major impetus of the U.S. aggression was to effect regime change in Russia, dealing it a “strategic defeat,” as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called it. Vladimir Putin was to be replaced with a more pliable leader. In fact, it was the U.S.’ leader, Joe Biden, who was replaced in the November elections. Do you suppose he appreciates the irony?
Finally, strategically. Only in Democratic Party circles, fronting as it always does for the weapons makers, does it make strategic sense to drive your two greatest adversaries into each other’s arms. Those would be China and Russia and that is exactly what Ukraine has done. That’s part of why the Democrats were handed their heads in the 2024 presidential election. Speaking of which…
It was 95 years ago that the Great Depression began. Capitalism on its own could not generate enough activity to employ all of the economy’s resources. So, Franklin Roosevelt modified capitalism to work with stabilizers from the state: federal work programs, unemployment insurance; tighter banking regulation; and more.
That fix served pretty well until 1980, when capitalists decided (as capitalists are wont to do) that they wanted more of the economy’s output for themselves. So, we began the regime of Neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan. That meant fewer regulations, lower taxes on the wealthy, jobs shipped abroad, the government helping to structure the economy with monopolies.
As much as anything else, the election of 2024 was a referendum on four decades of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism lost. A plurality of people would rather burn it all down than endure the assured, steady degradation of their life prospects that they’ve come to suffer for the last generation.
Unfortunately, the Democrats were the party in power when the referendum was held, in November, so they got stuck holding the turd. And it’s not like they didn’t deserve it.
Bill Clinton, the original Democratic Neoliberal, passed NAFTA, helping ship millions of good paying, Midwest metal-bending jobs to Mexico. He deregulated the banks, setting the economy up for the Great Recession. He helped the media industry become the fetid oligopoly that it is.
Barrack Obama enlisted Clinton’s economic team, en masse. When that Great Recession hit, Obama bailed out the banks that had caused it while letting 10 million families lose their homes to foreclosure. People remember.
The Democratic presidential campaign itself was a catastrophe, a debacle, a master class in narrative inanity, focal fluidity, and bumbling amateurism.
The Democrats couldn’t defeat the most notorious, noxious dirtbag ever to beslime American culture. A 34-time convicted felon. A man the Washington Post said was a rapist. Someone who carried out the most grievous assault on the State and the Constitution since the Civil War. A catastrophically failed former president whose signature ineptness caused more than a million excess deaths in the COVID pandemic. The Democrats couldn’t lay a glove on him.
Consider just one set of facts.
Donald Trump was the first president since the Great Depression to leave office with fewer people employed in the nation than when he entered. Joe Biden oversaw the creation of more than 16 million jobs, the greatest job creation record in history. And the Democrats couldn’t put together a coherent sentence about the economy. Can you remember one?
There’s a lot of hemming and hawing and navel-gazing and retrospective rationalizing about the election, especially in elite Democratic party circles. The most salient fact is this: more than 7 million fewer people voted for the Democratic candidate in 2024 than voted for the one in 2020. And that’s with the huge headwind of Dobbs at their back. Not even their own people believed in them.
Simply put, 2024 was the year we realized that the Democratic party is a spent force, not a competent, reliable party to represent the interests of the working and middle classes. It is the party that gave us Donald Trump and all of the leprous, anti-democratic, plutocratic agendas that he represents. Without being hysterical, it may be the end of democracy in America. Thank you, Democrats.
The party has no message, no messenger, no mechanism, not even an agenda that says anything to the working people of this county who are abandoning it in droves, and with good cause. It has allowed Republicans to brand it the party of inflation, elitism, transgenderism, and genocide. Can you see why it didn’t sell, even with the nose-bleeding $2 billion they spent trying to peddle it?
One last word on an important innovation that emerged in 2024. It has to do with the intersection of technology and culture and how that plays out in politics.
The first television broadcast was 97 years ago, in 1927. It allowed the top-down dissemination of received narratives about what was going on in the world. It allowed elites to control what the nation knew, and thought.
In some important measure, 2024 saw the overthrow of that thought control regime. Yes, television is still broadcast, but it is less and less influential in setting the national dialogue on almost all issues.
Instead, we see the rise, even the pre-eminence, of social media, much of which emerges from the bottom up, or at least without the editing filters that allowed elites to manage national perceptions.
More than anything else, it was Trump’s mastery of social media, and his use of it to propagate his lies, fear, conspiracies, and rage that accounted for his win in the 2024 election. It’s important to understand why that worked.
Social media monetizes the very worst elements of our individual and social psyches. It titillates our amygdala, our lizard brain. More money is made through more clicks, and more clicks are generated by delivery of more outrageous content.
But, the process satiates, so it demands ever more outrageous content, and then, still more, yet, until all that is being vended out is garbage, lies, conspiracy, indignation, and innuendo. And the more that is vended out, the more money is made.
It is impossible to contrive a more culturally auto-destructive techno-social dynamic than one that makes more money by vending more garbage into the culture. But that is what we have become.
Two centuries ago, the Enlightenment gave us the idea that Truth could be discerned through a process of Reason. No more. Indeed, there is no such thing as Truth, and no need for such a bothersome path through Reason. There is only a preponderance of clicks and the outrage or docility that such preponderance endows, like turning out pissed off voters.
We have constructed a Golden Calf of the demons of our baser nature and it is that Calf which we now idolize, because it makes the most money. The proof is that tens of millions of people worship at the feet of the most degenerate pathological liar the country has ever known, and fancy him some kind of Messiah.
They are going to follow his carnival barker hawkings until they are shorn of all of their dignity, all of their money, and all of their freedoms. And we, of ours. They’ll still imagine it a patriotic sacrifice and congratulate themselves for their courage in sticking it to the man.
Indeed, 2024 was a year for the ages.
