Anomie

Those who have been following me over time know of my tremendous esteem for Glenn Greenwald’s doggedly non-partisan reporting, currently on Rumble. However, I have not listened much to him lately. He naturally tends to concentrate on US affairs, and frankly, they don’t interest me much. After all, I live in Europe, where we have a war which eclipses all other issues, at least from the point of view of the interventionist political elite.

The other day, I read that the US had wiped a little open boat off the map. To use D.H. Wallace terminology, the US had “demapped” 11 persons in an open boat in international waters. I wondered briefly why on earth the US would do such a thing, then shrugged the matter off as “typical”. Please note: I shrugged. SHRUGGED about the massacre – extra-judicial killing – of 11 people in international waters. I add, to my defence that the Norwegian media wasted little ink on the matter.

I decided to listen to what Glenn Greenwald had to say about the matter (to be frank, I was more interested in hearing his take on the latest developments in the Epstein saga promised in the same episode).

Glenn Greenwald brought me back to earth quite robustly. He had no intention of fluttering gently over the extra-judicial killing of 11 persons by the US.

Instead he sternly asked the MAGA voters, “Do you believe, do you really believe that this was about drugs?” Raising his voice slightly, he went on: “What is the difference between the neocon policies that you, the MAGA people, oppose, and this?” Saying this, he looked me – the telespectator (MAGA or otherwise) – straight in the eye, accusing me or whoever else was watching him of condoning the incident with complacency.

And, yes, I felt guilty, although I certainly am not MAGA. I felt and definitely was guilty of assuming international law is no longer. International law still exists, but because of Gaza, because of the impunity of the savage crimes being committed by the Israelis with US blessings, all other crimes seem negligible. Because the USA is complicit in the crimes in Gaza, and because all other Western states are subordinate to the USA, international law is not being upheld.

That does not mean that the UN charter is null and void. That does not mean that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the UN conventions, including the Genocide convention, have not been globally agreed upon and ratified. Above all, I am convinced that if they were asked, the overwhelming majority of normal human beings all over the world (excepting of course the Israelis) would loudly cheer as the articles of the Declaration of Human Rights were read out to them.

I have assumed, but I have been wrong, that the “anything-goes-as -long-as-you-are-strong-and-dastardly-enough-LAW” applies. Biden referred to that law as “the rules-based order”. No such law has ever been ratified by any global authority. The Western nations tagged along behind “Daddy”, as they always do, but we all knew, or should have known that it was a hoax. No such law, no such order, exists. If we forget that, we become as degenerate as those who authorized the hoax in the first place, as well as the crimes committed in pursuance of it.

The USA has killed much more than the 11 unknown nationals and certainly not for the first time. (In that respect, I was right in muttering “typical”.) It has effectively killed the principles underlying its own judicial system. What is null and void, then, is US rule of law.

Glenn Greenwald did not say that. He is, after all, a US citizen, I think. But he was unusually, vitriolic about the issue, when he returned to it in a subsequent episode, yesterday, in fact. JD Vance and Rand Paul clash over due process

So now the United States government just has the power to go around and blow up any ship it wants, whatever ship it wants, and just declare afterwards that it was filled with drugs and drug dealers? .… to bomb wedding parties… there was someone there who had ties to a terrorist group… We don’t show evidence either before or after, we just claim the right to go around droning anybody we want.

And that was just the start. Glenn Greenwald felt, I think, shame and deep contempt for those who are complacent about such acts.

And he made me feel deeply ashamed. We are sliding, morally, I mean, losing our grip. Not just in the USA, but also here in Norway.

A few days prior to our national elections, students in upper secondary school all over my country carried out their own “election”. The result was interesting, to say the least, because the two parties furthest to the right won 47 per cent of the votes. These parties are primarily interested in getting rid of taxes, particularly the wealth tax. (I should add that only a small minority of Norwegians pay wealth tax.) The environmentalist party won only 4 per cent.

So youngsters here are not worried about the accelerating ecological breakdown. They are not overly concerned about growing inequality, and they certainly do not care for any redistribution of wealth. In short, the exercise seems to indicate a) a disturbing degree of ignorance b) a lack of interest in the common good.

I should, however, take comfort in knowing, or at least hoping, that Norway has not yet degenerated to the point of carrying out extra-judicial killings in international waters.