Narcissists don’t generally come to good ends. From Pepe Escobar at strategic-culture.su:
Mythic Narcissus, depending on his mood while facing his reflection in the pool, may at any moment authorize Kiev hits on Moscow and St. Petersburg with long-range missiles.
Alastair Crooke’s remarkable analysis of Trump in the context of myth as geopolitics has left us with much to ponder. There’s no escape from Trump’s “extraordinary ability to dominate the discourse”, globally, as well as his capacity for “bending people to his will” – and thus wreak havoc on the geopolitical chessboard.
Alastair stresses how Trump is skillfully “using mythic imagery” – actually crude archetypes – to always impress his (italics mine) narrative. The only narrative.
Yet Trump may not be straight-up Dionysian, compared to Apollonian Putin; he’s more like a Narcissus Drowned (in a pool of his own making). And when it comes to pop iconography, he’s certainly not The Godfather of Soul James Brown; more like the Village People – which were themselves a parody.
The most disturbing aspect of Trump the Self-Made Myth is what grip that death cult in West Asia holds over his imagination. Trump’s absolute normalization of genocide has made the whole – Wild – West civilization complicit. Alastair once again reminds us that “the bloodlust in Gaza”, awakened by the Torah, is driving “messianic, extreme Zionism” all the way “to barbarism”. That’s where we are now – with a License to Kill provided by a vicious, intolerant God: Yahweh.
Way below the mythical spheres where Trump does not fear to tread, rascals posing as the European political “elite” have created another myth: Putin as a “cannibal needing to eat” (copyright Le Petit Roi). He’s “The Beast at the Door”, with Russia framed as anti-Europe and anti-West, an existential threat: Putin and Russia morphed as The Anti-Christ.
Well, these intellectual midgets are obviously unaware that it was the Byzantine empire that survived the Roman Empire in the West for no less than a thousand years. Byzantium resisted everything: Goths, Avars, Arabs, Bulgars – until they could not resist the Ottomans. Still, they managed to evangelize the Bulgars and Kievan Russia, and even provided a state model to the Ottomans.
There won’t be any Byzantine Part Deux for the fake and GAE once Moshe Trumpstein (MIGA) wipes it all out for Palantir?
Sad trombone. (honk, honk)