A cry for life in a broken world

The 2024 election was an attempted rejection of evil

Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem. Wikipedia.

On November 16th, lame duck President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine’s use of long range U.S. missiles to strike hundreds of miles inside Russia. The Ukrainians dutifully fired a first round of the new weapons into Russia three days later, Nov. 19th.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is simultaneously telling anyone who will listen that the Biden administration plans to push out as many weapons as possible to Ukraine before the January 20, inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump so that Ukraine can continue fighting through 2025 irrespective of what Trump does.

Reactions to Biden’s new missile authorization range from dire warnings of nuclear war by top Kremlin military leaders to boastful celebration by Blinken.

Wherever one falls on the spectrum of reaction to this senseless escalation, it is a striking and emblematic decision by Biden & Company.

The last four years of the Biden regime have been a public exercise in quotidian evil. Biden and his cadre of bland neocon foreign policy advisers tend to escape detection as the nihilistic monsters they are because they are masters at acting as if their actions are nothing out of the ordinary, as if the most unhinged decisions endangering millions of lives are perfectly normal.

One is tempted to use Hannah Arendt’s description of colorless Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as embodying a phenomenon she famously described as “the banality of evil.” It certainly fits.

But there is something more going on with Biden in his capacity as the latest and least principled avatar of the neocon regime that has been slowly, relentlessly tightening its political grip and strangling the remnants of democratic life out of the nation since 9/11.