Syria is in another – or resumed – round of chaos. Things had stabilized there for a while – fighting still went on, but no faction could gain a distinct advantage. Its back to falling apart, I understand, because a lot of Hezbollah and other Islamist fighters were drawn into Lebanon to fight the Israelis and this allowed other factions to advance. Now there is once again doubt that the Assad regime can survive – and, once again, the Christians of Syria are under massive threat because the people who are currently advancing hate everyone who isn’t them and nobody in the world gives a damn if you rape, enslave and murder Christians. And, yes, Team Biden helped make this all possible.

This is good time to remind everyone that Syria isn’t even a country. The Experts rate about 80% of the population as “Syrian Arabs” but these are just Syrians who speak Arabic…the whole place is a hodgepodge of peoples. The flotsam and jetsam of various migrations and conquests going back 4,000 years. Even among those who speak Arabic as their mother tongue there are deep ethnic and religious differences. And Syria was never a country – no matter how far you go back, you won’t find a Kingdom of Republic of Syria prior to 1945. Since it was first conquered by outsiders, it has always been a province of an Empire of one sort or another and its borders were forever drawn and redrawn at the convenience of the imperial overlord. Syria’s current borders were set post-WWI via various treaties ratifying the Middle Eastern result.

What the world has done since 1945 is play make-believe – that Syria is a country, that Syrians are a people and we’re all supposed to respect this legal entity as if it were the same thing as, say, Spain. But the only way we could play this make-believe was by essentially going along with a dictator who held the disparate peoples together. Since 1971, this has been the Assad family (father and son). They pretended to be President of Syria – as if anyone other than their particular cronies had any respect for them – and we pretended they were the patriotic expression of the Syrian people (who don’t exist). It only worked as long as nobody internally had the wherewithal to challenge the Assad system…staring in 2011 (and partially fostered by the Obama Administration which was committed to helping Islamist movements throughout the Middle East), this system started to collapse…but as of today Assad is still officially in office because he’s been getting just enough support from Russia and Iran to hold on to Damascus…which we pretend is the capital city of a nation called Syria.

Getting back to that fighting against Israel – it officially ended with a cease fire. Or, in other words, an unmitigated Israeli defeat. To be sure, the Israelis are back-slapping themselves on how massively they degraded both Hamas and Hezbollah capabilities, especially in the number of senior leaders killed. This was all useful effort…but as long as Hamas and Hezbollah exist, Israel loses. The Islamists don’t work on our time line. In their eyes, this is just a repeat of 1099 to 1187 – that is, First Crusade to the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. And keep in mind that until Hattin, it didn’t seem like the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was in serious danger of falling…and then it fell. To the Muslim Islamist determined to liberate “Palestine”, this is all just part of a very long war which, in their minds, will end in ultimate victory.

And they’re right about that – at least, they are right as long as Israel refuses to wage full scale war against them…and as long as the West does everything in its power to prevent Israel from waging full scale war. And, once again, we’re in the land of make-believe here. In this case, pretending there is some fundamental separation between Hamas and Hezbollah, or that the sponsors of these groups are at cross-purposes. We additionally pretend that the goal of the Islamists is peace – it isn’t. Their goal is victory and for them there is no peace without it. What is happening in Syria is a conflict between different factions who have the same ultimate goal – total control of the entire Muslim world and the extermination of Israel and the Jews.

If you really look at it, our entire foreign policy is just make-believe. Aside from making believe that Israel can live in peace with people who want them dead, we also pretend that NATO will put an army into the field at need. That China wants peace and stability in east Asia. That Mexico has a government that can cooperate with us to stop the Cartels from importing drugs and slaves into the USA. Even some of the deepest MAGA people share these Ruling Class illusions. It is time to dispense with them. To view the world as it is.

And the first thing to understand is that the world is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy. That is, the peoples of the world, for the most part, never really consented to the condition of the world. I’ve talked about some of the more glaring aspects of this in the past. One really good for-instance here is Algeria – which is also not a country. It was a coastal province of the Ottoman Empire when the French showed up in the 1830s. Like Syria, it had never been a country – never was there a Kingdom or Republic of Algeria. The land, itself, had gone by various names since Antiquity under this or that imperial overlord. The French called it Algeria because Algiers was the first point taken by the French and they just extended the name of that nest of pirates (it barely amounted to a town at the time) to the rest of the lands they conquered from 1830 to about 1870. But come the 1950’s, “Algeria” had a “national liberation movement”…to “liberate” a “nation” that had never existed before. Small wonder that more “Algerians” fought for France than for independence. And that when “Algeria” was “liberated” vast number of people fled…they wanted no part of the pack of bank robbers, rapists and murderers who had emerged triumphant in the French colony. And since independence Algeria has had successive rounds of oppression, coups, civil strife, electoral fraud and so forth with a Ruling clique precariously on top but kept afloat by oil money. There still is no Algeria. There still is no legitimate government of Algeria. Its still just a geographic expression. But it is all part of the make-believe and Algeria has a seat in the UN and we have an ambassador there and we act like its a country.

But while the country is make-believe, it has genuine results in the world. Because we pretended that Algeria is a country – because the whole world pretended – untold numbers of people died in a civil war there, often via the most savage methods. This was better than it being part of France? Sure, the French could be rat bastards at times…but they didn’t send gangs of psychopaths around to rape and murder people over political or religious differences. I think that’s kind of a bare minimum here…and if your system allows it to happen, its a bad system that needs to be disposed of. And even if it happens only once…you know, if there is one, single instance of rape-death squads operating in your system, its a bad system. It isn’t enough that the particular round of rape-murder ends…it should never have happened. Anyone contemplating sending out the rape-death squads should have been so certain that this ends with him strung up on a lamp post that he never sends out the rape-death squads. Kinda see where I’m going here? There is bare minimum human decency that we’re supposed to have…and anyone who can’t adhere to this bare minimum better be killed as soon as possible. Preferably after a couple rounds of being flogged and branded with a hot poker…just to really drive home the message that you can’t do that.

We’ve pretended ourselves into a world where rape-death squads are fairly common (you know, like on 10/7…but before and after 10/7 rape-death squads have been operating in parts of Africa). Where literal tens of thousands of minors are trafficked across borders and everyone acts like its just one of those things that can’t be prevented. Where drug addicts wander streets and the proposed solution is to give them a clean place to get high. On and on and on like that…every day people are abused and killed in our world because the global system bears no relation to the desires of the people (nobody voted for rape-death squads or drug addicts). Most governments around the world, most of the time, are simply illegitimate…they don’t remotely reflect what the people want, even if you can point to a previous election where the party in power got the most votes. I absolutely guarantee you that no political party in the UK ran on a program of fostering rape-gangs – but Britain had and has a problem of “migrant” gangs grooming young girls for the sex trade. This was not on a campaign poster. Nobody voted for it. Preventing it is a simply matter of logistics – in this case, kicking out the population which housed the groomers. It is there because the system wants it there no matter what the people want…and a system which implements policy against the desires of the people has no legitimacy.

Right now, I rate only Argentina, Israel, Japan and maybe two or three other nations as fully under the control of a government both voted for by the people and implementing policies the people want. Come January 20th the USA will rejoin this club (nobody voted for Biden to open up the border…nor torpedo peace in Ukraine…nor provide cash to Iran so they could pay for 10/7…nor print up so much money that eggs are a luxury…nor decide that people can be born in the wrong body so better let boys play in girls sports…). And even in those nations which have a responsible government, the overall world system is still trying to thwart it. To deliberately and maliciously ensure that the desires of the people are not implemented. To force, that is, everyone to stay in the world of make-believe where a “rules based international order” means rapists parachuting from the sky and then everyone says, “don’t kill the rapists! That would be mean!”. No, thanks. I want out of that system. I voted for an exit on 11/5 and I want the whole system tossed on to the ash heap of history. I want to live in the real world – a world where I get what I want, not what some illusionist pretends I want.