The past week has led me to the con­clu­sion that  the world would be a lot safer and less com­pli­cat­ed if the par­ents of a select few of the world’s cur­rent idiot lead­ers had taught them the idiom: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander”,

 Change “good” to “bad:”, and even the most arro­gant and igno­rant might be able to grasp  the les­son that the rules of fair­ness and equal treat­ment apply to all sides.
It might also help them under­stand that  not abid­ing by it, reduces them to the  epit­o­me of the wis­dom of the Roman states­man Cicero: “It is the pecu­liar qual­i­ty of a fool to per­ceive the faults of oth­ers and to for­get his own.”
Then even Sec­re­tary of Defence Pete Hegseth might begin to grasp the hypocrisy of sink­ing small boats (and com­mit­ting the war crime of fir­ing on sur­vivors in the water),  and indict­ing for­mer Cuban leader Raul Cas­tro for order­ing his air force to shoot down two U.S.-registered civil­ian air­craft thir­ty years ago.
The planes belonged to a group that had pre­vi­ous­ly dropped anti-regime leaflets on Havana. which to the Cuban gov­ern­ment was the equiv­a­lent of bring­ing in illic­it drugs.
Hegseth claimed, but has so far offered no con­crete proof, that the boats were smug­gling drugs to the U.S,. for South Amer­i­can car­tels and warned: “Pres­i­dent Trump can and will take deci­sive mil­i­tary action as he sees fit to defend our nation’s inter­ests. Let no coun­try on Earth doubt that for a moment.”        .
Now sub­sti­tute “Cas­tro” for “Trump” in the Hegseth rant and you get….goose and gander.
Whether that would help high­light the non­sense that Cuba pos­es so great a threat to U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty that it must  be coun­tered with sub­ject­ing ordi­nary Cubans, who have no say in the mat­ter either way, to a crip­pling embar­go, enforced with a block­ade that cuts off oil, is debat­able however.
But then, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion seems obliv­i­ous to the neg­a­tive world-wide effects of its actions.
And while I do accept that Amer­i­cans and the rest of us are inter­change­able geese and gan­ders in feel­ing the impact of its war in Iran…please, spare us the bleat­ing about how you have to  “pay at the pumps”.
Your dread­ed $4.50 a (U,S,) gal­lon trans­lates at the pumps here in Italy (and most of the rest to Europe) to close as dammit to $7 a U.S. gallon.
And tens of mil­lions of oth­ers who had no say in the selec­tion of an admin­is­tra­tion that believes what’s good for it is all that counts, are suf­fer­ing in ways most of us can­not begin to imagine.
So if you want to claim the man­tel of the great­est  pow­er on Earth, and rule over it as you see fit, a lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion and periph­er­al vision would go a long way.

                ANOTHER APPLICATION

The Israeli gov­ern­ment is cur­rent­ly in thrall to de fac­to if not de jure war crim­i­nals in its ranks,  and seems (as has been their wont in per­pe­tu­ity) to believe “cease­fire” trans­lates as “You cease. We fire.”
In the first six months of the cease­fire in Gaza. more than 700 Pales­tini­ans and four Israelis were killed. Mean­ing­ful recon­struc­tion or even sig­nif­i­cant rub­ble clear­ing has not begun, and Israeli forces con­tin­ue to expand their area of total con­trol and demolition.
Lebanon is lit­tle bet­ter with the added prob­lem that Hezbol­lah isn’t ful­ly hold­ing to the let­ter of the term either.
On a sim­i­lar plain, right wing Israeli zealots and anti-Semi­tes are mir­ror­ing each oth­er, with nei­ther side show­ing any under­stand­ing of their “cause” oth­er than zero sum,  or that it leaves them as equals in repug­nant ways.
Israel’s secu­ri­ty min­is­ter, Ita­mar Ben-Gvir, drew world-wide con­dem­na­tion, even from fel­low min­is­ters, for taunt­ing detainees from the Gaza aid flotil­la, arrayed face down, hands bound.
The par­al­lel between abhor­rent acts of anti-Semi­tism and his own behav­iour did not seem to occur to Ben Gvir or his supporters.
Nonethe­less, as Israel main­tains it has the author­i­ty to “seize and con­fis­cate ves­sels try­ing to vio­late a law­ful naval blockade.”
That sounds a lot like the ratio­nale of both Iran and the U.S. for their tit-for-tat block­ades in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iran­ian regime also man­aged to achieve some­thing of a stale­mate by what is known as  “tri­an­gu­lar coer­cion,”  coun­ter­ing the more pow­er­ful forces of the U.S.  and Israel by attack­ing the vul­ner­a­ble Gulf states and by exten­sion the world economy.
It would appear that in a per­verse way, the respec­tive lead­er­ship of the three war­ring par­ties did learn the “what’s good for the goose…” lesson.
More’s the pity that they’ve applied it from the neg­a­tive perspective.
One won­ders if Cicero could have imag­ined his les­son would be so suc­cinct­ly per­son­i­fied more than two mil­len­nia after he first taught it.

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