Tag: British Empire

Genocide Syndrome by Proxy?

~ The Koboi Project

Many critics and commentators have characterized Ukraine as a proxy for the collective West in a geopolitical strategy against Russia. As Ramesh Thakur puts it, “Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West … that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War.” Perhaps Israel’s position vis-a-vis Palestine and the wider Middle East belies an analogous imperative of great power politics. Israel was created under the auspices of a declining British empire, whose mantle was assumed by the United States which remains the greatest power in the world today. While Israel appears to have co-opted the United States polity in its Genocide of Palestinians and must, of course, be held responsible for its actions, it is the Americans who are ultimately answerable, as Israel is wholly dependent on their enablement.

In fact, Alexander Haig, a four-star general in the US Army who served as its vice chief of staff, as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as United States Secretary of State, and as White House Chief of Staff under two presidents is reported to have said that Israel is “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” Indeed, the United States is a great power and, as such, must be held responsible for its actions within its expansive sphere of influence on the world stage. In this light, the idea that the Israeli lobby determines US policy towards Palestine is, regardless of this lobby’s enormous influence, a profound misconception. At best it is a misunderstanding of the machinations of the United States military-industrial complex; at worst, it is yet another expression, albeit a subliminal one, of an underlying anti-semitism! 

To restate this argument as a counter-idiomatic interrogative – can the tail really wag its dog?

The image above is adapted from the perspicacious and prescient 2014 cartoon by Rob Rogers pictured below.


Note: There is a mental health disorder, that involves a behavioral pattern between a caregiver (perpetrator) and a person cared for (victim), called ‘Munchausen syndrome by proxy,’ in which a caregiver makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms in a victim to make it appear that the victim has a true physical or mental health issue.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2014/08/11/rob-rogers-makes-the-mistake-of-expressing-an-opinion-on-israel-and-gaza/

https://www.jpost.com/International/Haig-had-a-special-feeling-for-Israel

https://brownstone.org/articles/ukraine-as-a-proxy-war-conflicts-issues-parties-and-outcomes/

https://www.verywellmind.com/munchausen-by-proxy-5071840

Dari Pusat Tasek 14

~ The Koboi Project ~ Leave a comment

So where is the mythical Pusat Tasek Pauh Janggi located? I have found two possible locations so far; one from Pigafetta’s notes, is somewhere north or south the island of Borneo and the other, from the Perak establishment (pertabalan) myth of the Perak Sultanate, somewhere off the mouth of the Perak River. Now from that masterful, yet woefully ‘ortentalist’ (in Edward Said’s meaning of ‘Orientalism’ ), storyteller Rudyard Kipling’s, Just So Stories, I have found that there is also a way to conceive of a congruence or conflation of these locations.

In his tale of how the crab came to have pincers and live in holes in the sand titled The Crab That Played With The Sea he tells also of the cause of the tides and the currents and their primordial connection with the Pusat Tasik Pauh Janggi. While this tale is most interesting for its domestication and massification of colonial ethnography in the public discourse of Empire, I find its placement of the Tusat Tasek its greatest draw in the context of my present Dari Pusat Tasek project.

As the Elder Magician, the Son of Adam and his young daughter go in search of Pau Amma, the giant crab –

“they pushed out on the Perak river. Then the sea began to run back and back, and the canoe was sucked out of the mouth of the Perak river, past Selangor, past Malacca, past Singapore, out and out to the Island of Bingtang, as though it had been pulled by a string … So he took the paddle; but there was no need to paddle, for the water flowed steadily past all the islands till they came to the place called Pusat Tasek—the Heart of the Sea—where the great hollow is that leads down to the heart of the world, and in that hollow grows the Wonderful Tree, Pauh Janggi ..“

So it seems that in the space and time of mythology, and, in fact, of voyages in general, movement on a given course implies no necessary limit on the distance travelled, such that “off the mouth of the Perak River” can mean “North or South of Borneo Island”, of course!