The spirit of Cardinal Richelieu declared,” Hamas won second prize this time.” ” First place in that region of the world means you are eligible to compete for first place the following time.” The second reward is that you are no longer alive.
The highest strategist of the Thirty Years’ War and the creator of France’s uneven victory over the wealthier and more populous Austrian Empire were both spirits I initially conjured up in the Carthusian ossuary beneath Paris’ sewers, where I was shivering once more. Skulls on top of neatly stacked rows of ivory grinned at me from all sides as nitre drippered from the green rocks.
Until I arrived at the location of my midnight rendezvous with the Cardinal, I had carried a large of Chateau Petrus and spittoon down the spiral stairway hidden beneath the Pont d’Alma, also known as the Bridge of Souls, in Paris’ 7th district, to the crumbling marble stairs beneath Napoleon III’s 19th-century drainage system, through masonry covered in the mold of the ages.
I filled the spittoon with the sweet Bourdeaux and waited for the great man’s withered grey appearance. It” inserted a spectral beak into the mouth of the trashcan and absorbed the water until it transformed into Richelieu’s colored clothes.” Its mind withdrew with a plop and spoke to me in Maurice Chevalier’s intonation,” So why do you not phone?”
I stumbled,” Excuse me, Eminence.” I’ve been extremely active.
” No, Spengler, you’ve been complacent ,” reprimanded the ghost. similar to the Israelis
Eminence,” All talks about Israel’s knowledge failure.”
Spengler said,” It was much worse than a lack of knowledge.” Israel is unable to comprehend the world in which it is located. Too many people around the world can predict a time when their language won’t be used, their lifestyle will be preserved in books, and other people will live in the fields and valleys they currently call home. A people without a prospect also lacks logical self-interest.
However, Hamas are maniacs! I objected. They have lost their minds!
The Cardinal declared,” Somebody is going crazy, Spengler, with the possible exception of the Chinese, who may not have fully embraced the madness that permeates the entire world.” Think about the Ukrainians: Why should they rely on removing all Russian, as well as Romanian and Polish, from the Soviet-era territories? Why not allow Russian listeners to run their own local authorities and schools, as Putin suggested ten years ago?
Ukraine is a dying nation, which is the cause. Nine million of its 21 million working-age residents had left for work abroad before the war, producing little more than one child per woman. This intra-Slavic slaughter was the easiest battle in recent memory to avoid, but the Ukrainians entered a war with Russia out of arrogance born of despair.
The ghost of the Cardinal started to enlarge like Faust’s puppy. Why did Azerbaijan feel the need to conquer the Armenian enclave of Nagorno – Karabakh after more than 30 years and drive out 120, 000 people whose ancestors had lived there for 2,000 years? Request the Serbs why their army is stationed on Kosovo’s borders, ready to drive out Albanians who, with the aid of the United States, seized the county from Serbia in 2008?
But how does that relate to the Palestinians? ” I objected.
The Cardinal’s spirit hissed,” The Palestinians are the most susceptible of all citizens ,” because they were never a people in the first place. Why is there even such a thing as an Israelite? No Arab identified as a Arab prior to Israel’s declaration of independence. A people transfer similar to the exchange of Greeks and Turks after 1922 occurred during and after the 1948 war between Israel and Arab countries, which resulted in the expulsion of 800 000 Jews and 800,000 Arabs from Israeli territory.
” As well as the offspring of the Hispanic Jews driven out of Spain in 1492, the Jews of Iraq and Persia, whose ancestors had lived there for 2,500 years, left with the clothing on their backs.” Israel took them in. The 800,000 migrants from the 1948 war were kept in isolated camps by the Arab state because they refused to accept the existence of the Hebrew State.
Prior to the Hebrew state’s resolution, the majority of Arabs in Palestine were economic immigrants who arrived as the Zionists started to rebuild the nation. They were merely hostages of the Egyptian states’ rejection of Israel’s living; they were not a country. The Palestinians wouldn’t have any explanation to be there in the first place if the Muslim states were to make peace with Israel, especially Saudi Arabia, the protector of Islam’s holiest sites. Simply put, they would be asynchronous Arabs.
I retorted,” But Israel has the help of the Americans in dealing with Saudi Arabia.
The Americans, perhaps? Richelieu let out a snort. Israel’s issue is that it is an alliance of a decrepit power that destroyed Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
But Eminence, what will happen? What will become of the Palestinians?
” Ask the Serbs in Kosovo, the Eastern ethnic Ukrainians, or the Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh.” The issue is that the inhabitants transfer from the 1940s, which involved 800,000 Arabs to 80,000 Jews, was not finished. The cultural jumble of the previous dynasties is disintegrating. Israel may make life in Gaza so challenging that a sizable portion of the population will depart, or Israel itself may be uninhabitable, and Israelis will depart.
Some might argue, Eminence, that people transfers are an act of ethnic cleansing, shocking the world’s conscience.
Balivernes! The spirit of the Cardinal, which had grown so big that it was pressing up against the bone bundles, exclaimed. It may burst the moralizing amour-proper balloon that has kept American policy thus constantly stupid for the past 50 years. For people who are cursed with an death foreboding, Gilead contains no remedy.
” Majesty, if Israel destroys Hamas with some civilian casualties, absolutely the Arab Gulf States may turn against it.”
” Foutaise!” exclaimed Richelieu. ” Once the Arab world accepts Israel’s life, the Gulf States know better than anyone that the Palestinians have no reason to exist.” The Gulf States, on the other hand, are painfully aware that they have raised a dragon and are more eager than anyone to get rid of it.
I was now pinned against the wall by the expanding form, and the legs behind me tickled my rear. We were again a folks, and now we are no more, the skulls started to rock back and forth. Those who are alive you see their lot in those who have come before them.
The grinning skulls shone through the fading robes of the Cardinal, whose spirit had lost its crimson shine and was turning shiny. Their chorus grew louder and more loud. I tried to scream,” Go back to being dead ,” but their clamor drowned out my own voice.
A version of the Jerusalem Post and an empty container of Bowmore greeted me when I awoke.