Actually, the line runs, “one Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them, one Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,” and is taken from Lord of the Rings.
I asked my favourite AI service how many people have seen the Lord of the Rings films or read the book, and I am glad to report that AI was flummoxed by my question. It had no idea how many people had read the book. True, it could report that “The films have been seen by roughly 300 million+ people in theaters alone”, but of course it had no idea, either, of how many people had streamed the films at home.
I feel a need to add, that much as they are made to appear human, AI services don’t have “ideas”, and that I, being human and therefore easily deluded, fell into the trap of imagining for a moment that my interlocutor was sentient.
We are all, like it or not, susceptible to information warfare. And information warfare is being waged. We don’t see much about it in the news, but it is even more important than the news items we do see – strikes here, strikes there – missiles, drones and whatnot. President Lyndon B. Johnson allegedly said, referring to Vietnam: “the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there”. I add, though nobody has asked me, that the ultimate victory will depend on our hearts and minds.
Lord of the Rings is basically about good versus evil. Most of us, according to the saga, ascribe to the good side, though we may indulge in our little sins. The bad side, however, is the ruler of Mordor, the unbelievably cruel Sauron whose subjects fear him and do his bidding out of terror, and whose armies – the Orcs – are without soul.
It goes without saying that Sauron’s mission was not to serve his people, which is allegedly the mission of presidents and prime ministers in the political west. Obviously, even warmongers such as Dick Cheney, Lindsey Graham, Starmer, Merz, Stoltenerg and Rutte cannot be compared to a Sauron. Not even Netanyahu is a Sauron, (though he certainly is the most sinister character I have heard about, excepting perhaps Hitler). They all claim to “serve” the good cause. At worst they might be compared to the self-aggrandising figure of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert just before WWI, who also claimed to serve the good cause.
Lord of the Rings shares a template with much of Hollywood’s film production. And Hollywood, as we should know by now, together with popular music, serves as the basis for the US grip on hearts and minds all over the world.
Now that grip is slipping a little. Here in Norway, people are saying that President Trump is “just simply too much”. They hadn’t noticed the Dick Cheyneys and the Lindsey Grahams, and most of them hadn’t even noticed the continuous string of wars waged by the USA even since before they were born. Most people are busy just getting along, passing exams, earning a living, feeding their kids and enjoying maybe an hour’s rest before bed, in front of their television screens, ref. panem et circenses.
Night after night – year in year out – in front of the screen, watching the good guys triumphing over the bad guys… Listen to the Raiders March (composed by John Williams). It epitomises US self-satisfaction and confidence – hubris, as some would say. We hear the determined beat of boots bravely going off to defend a good cause. Since the cause is good, they are joined, of course by others – it’s the American way, don’t you know – as more and more boots march on, until thousands and thousands are surging ahead on their way to the battlefield. We don’t hear much of the battle itself – a dreamlike sequence – but eventually, the original theme emerges once again, victorious: crowds are cheering, flags are waving, brilliant sunlight is reflected off gleaming trumpets, etc.
Year in year out. This sort of treatment cannot fail to have an effect, not only on US citizens, but on all the political West. We are all brothers and sisters, we are all on the good side, the side of Democracy, liberty, justice. Almost all: Netanyahu, also in the “American camp”, is merely an aberration, a mutant so to speak, whom we never really noticed until now, though he has been there, biding his time all along.
Only now that BRICS is threatening the position of the reserve currency, only now has Netanyahu’s moment finally come. Why? Because the US is losing its grip, and with the US, the entire political West has, as Alex Krainer puts it, hit the iceberg. Desperate manoeuvres are required. The people in charge are starting to panic, while most of the passengers are obliviously sleeping or being served by well-behaved waiters as the orchestra plays popular tunes such as Raiders’ March.
Many analysts and commentators expect a serious depression, but nowhere have I seen an explanation of how and why that depression will occur until I heard Alex Krainer’s eminently comprehensible account. He also explains how the political West’s defence of “the good cause” is as fictitious as Lord of the Rings. We can of course hope that he is wrong. On the other hand, he might just be right.