The triumphalism on all sides with regard to the two week suspension on the Israeli orchestrated United States attacks on Iran seems counterproductive.  No one has won and everyone has lost, especially the sense of decency in international affairs, the concept of “law” (not just internationally but constitutionally) and, of course, the families of all the victims who have been murdered.  Murdered just as surely as victims continue to be murdered in armed conflicts where the only victors are the military industrial complex against which Ike warned us well over half a century ago.  We humans are easily manipulated and induced to engage in inhuman conduct and inherent hypocrisy, assisted by our ability to profoundly express moral and religious beliefs which we cavalierly ignore, usually in the name of false patriotism and purportedly in an incoherently misdirected quest for security, all desensitized by “bread and circuses” (but without the bread).

Diplomacy has become nonexistent, especially among the states that comprise the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  But it’s also become non-existent among the victims of that (purportedly) defensive alliance; victims who seem more interested in antagonizing mad bulls than in manipulating them (as the wise-weak once did in artful forms of agonizing savage bulls). But then again, those bulls had been tamed and drugged after having been captured and imprisoned and thus, the metaphor does not quite fit, except perhaps as a visual aid.  Name calling, insulting and cursing; threats; imposition of economic sanctions designed to cause starvation; kidnapping and murdering of opposition leaders, those are the new norms and norms tend to be copied.  Just noting.  While the foregoing deterioration of the polite and subtle discourse that once characterized foreign services is accelerating, accelerating in alarming fashion, it is not all that new.  It’s been a growing trend for at least half a century.  Or perhaps for a millennium or two.  And while diplomacy tends to involve inter-state affairs, the trend has leaked into the domestic sphere, now characterizing domestic politics as well.  But it hasn’t stopped there.  Check your social media; Yankees’ fans have really caught on.  And the exchange of information at all levels has become the art of disinformation, artful disinformation so-to-speak.  B.F. Skinner’s legacy, the gift that keeps on giving is now freed from Madison Avenue and Hollywood.  It’s become ubiquitously omnipresent, now enhanced by artificial intelligence.  Empathy???  Hmmm, what’s that?

As a historian, political analyst and commentator I look at what is reported as news today and which will soon calcify into purported history and ask myself how much of what we’ve been taught, how much of what I’ve taught, about the unending armed conflicts we humans engage and have engaged in since we evolved into our most primitive forms as members of the homo genus series of species; forms that purportedly separated us from the ancestors of our simian cousins, or perhaps from the first spark of life, is even partially accurate.  Certainly some of it has to be even if only by pure coincidence or perhaps, carelessness.  But most of it is not.  Is it any wonder then that we seemingly learn absolutely nothing from our devastating mistakes, mistakes we refuse to admit and which we paper over with noble sounding platitudes? 

Today, because of the resemblance to the attitudes preceding the first and second wars to end all wars, World War comes to mind.  At its conclusion purportedly back and white distinctions between the combatants were drawn, albeit only after research into critical interpretative factors was made illegal.  Made criminal, formally and culturally, with those who questioned official narratives labeled immoral deviants.  World War II, like World War I, turned out to be a war in which the victors who wrote the history were at least as evil as the vanquished, although following World War II the leaders of the vanquished were executed in what now seem to have been show trials held in the vanquished city of Nuremburg.  In hindsight, the victors, the ones who first engaged in nuclear warfare after having engaged in their own forms of genocide for millennia seem more evil than those who they conquered, … well, conquered again.  And again and again and again.  Now, I ask myself, and I ask those who chance to read this article, has anything we’ve been taught about that horrible conflict actually proven to have been accurate?  Consider this: the purported victims of the Nazis whose protection was a purportedly existential obligation have, during more than three quarters of a century, acted no differently with respect to Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, etc., than did their purported victimizers acted with respect to them.  Genocide then was evil, today it’s necessary to combat terrorism (which is what the Nazis and Japanese and Italians claimed they were doing way back when).  And unprovoked sneak attacks?  Well they apparently no longer involve “days that will live in infamy” but rather, days of national pride.  And nuclear weapons?  Well, they were briefly anathema but now they’re to be hoarded for possible use, when and if convenient.  The names and faces have been changed as detective sergeant Joe Friday might have said on the old television series Dragnet (back in simpler times) but, in this case, they’ve been changed to protect the guilty rather than the innocent.

Thus we find ourselves where we are.

Devastatingly polarized and confused by the ever changing variants of “official” verities just as B.F. Skinner’s nemesis (well, other than Noam Chomsky), Eric Arthur Blair writing as George Orwell presciently predicted three quarters of a century ago (just before he prudently died, leaving us to fend for ourselves).
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.