The two most important stories of 2024

I had intended to post about the most important story of the year, but when trying to decide what that was, I found it impossible to choose between the two obvious contenders.  So I'll be discussing both -- one within the US, the other overseas.

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The top domestic story, obviously, was the nationwide outburst of outspoken class consciousness following the UHC CEO assassination.  I've already posted about this in detail.  Finally the broad mass of people are refusing to keep on going round and round in the same old mental ruts of left-vs-right, Trump, party politics, demonization of the "other side", etc, and are showing a startlingly clear awareness and focus on what really matters -- the class struggle, even if people don't use that term nowadays.  Memes on the theme are exploding across the American internet.  Everywhere people are exchanging their stories of the abuses, not only of the for-profit US healthcare system, but of the domination of the billionaire oligarch parasite class over society and the economy in general.

This is what people have been trying to get across to the deaf political elites (however inarticulately), but found that traditional party politics is almost useless as a vehicle for doing so, with one party hopelessly timid about the problem and the other dedicated to actively making it worse with even more tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy, and both of them paralyzed by their dependence on billionaire donors.

There were some murmurs of it after the Titan submersible implosion, with a few jokes and memes about the billionaires whose hubris in desecrating a mass grave in such an ineptly-built vehicle led to their deaths.  But now the dam has burst.  I honestly had no idea that such a great mass of Americans already had such a highly-developed sense of the reality of their situation.  This newly-militant class consciousness, not the election, is what foreshadows the real shape of things to come.

The parasitic oligarchs and their wholly-owned mass media and tame pundits, along with nervous political activists on both left and right who sense their pet narratives becoming irrelevant, have of course responded with a barrage of imperious scolding and performative shock.  But it's not going to work.  They're not going to be able to herd people back into the old echo chambers and the old ways of thinking.

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The most important overseas story was Israel's increasingly-decisive crushing of the forces of genocidal jihadism arrayed against it.  I am no fan of Netanyahu, but his achievements here have been beyond all expectations.  At every turn, the US and the West in general advised timidity and holding back, while neo-Nazi mobs in the campuses and streets actively cheered on the mass rapists and murderers of Jews.  Again and again Netanyahu disregarded their tremulous counsel and struck decisively at the enemy -- and he has been thoroughly vindicated by the results.

Hamas is practically crushed, with most of its leaders dead and most of its infrastructure destroyed.  Hezbollah is crippled, with hundreds and perhaps thousands of terrorists killed or disabled by the brilliant pager attack and other actions conventional and unconventional, and has essentially begged for peace.  And after hundreds of drone and missile attacks from the Houthis in Yemen, Israel is now beginning to hit back hard against them as well.

All three of these gangs are clients of the Iranian theocracy, and the Israeli victories against them hugely weaken that regime's regional influence and its ability to cause trouble.  Beyond that, the theocracy's most important client of all, the Asad regime in Syria, has collapsed with stunning speed.  This was not caused by Israel, except insofar as the general weakening of Iran limited its ability to help Asad; the main cause was the weakening of Asad's other supporter, Russia, due to the war in Ukraine.  But Israel boldly took advantage of the collapse to destroy Syria's air force, missiles, and chemical-weapons facilities.  It's too early to tell whether the new leaders in Syria will be more willing to accept Israel's existence -- but even if they turn out to be hostile, the threat they can pose to Israel and the help they can give to what's left of Hezbollah will be greatly reduced.

In October there was even some direct skirmishing between Israel and Iran; Israel destroyed a critical part of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, while Iran's missiles fired at Israel were ineffectual.

All this leaves the Iranian theocracy in the position of an octopus with most of its tentacles hacked off.  To make matters worse, the regime faces a threat of unrest from its own subjects perhaps greater than any since the massive 2013 protests.  The country is sinking into poverty so severe that malnutrition is becoming a problem, and -- incredibly for a nation with such huge oil and gas reserves -- it's even facing a serious energy shortage.  Iranians are well aware that all this is the fault of the theocracy's incompetence and fanaticism; there is little support for the regime's deranged hatred of Israel.  After nearly half a century of brutal religious repression, most Iranians are hungry for freedom.  Netanyahu himself has affirmed that Israel stands with the Iranians against the theocracy.  If the regime does fall, and is replaced by a government more representative of the people, Iran could even become a de facto ally of Israel and the West, transforming the whole Middle East.

I posted about this back in October, though at that point some of the most important developments had not yet happened.

It now appears that the ghastly October 7 attack was jihadism's Pearl Harbor -- an atrocity that boomeranged back catastrophically upon its perpetrators, eventually leading to their crushing defeat.

I hope that 2025 will bring a similarly overwhelming victory for that other embattled bastion of democracy and civilization -- Ukraine.