July 8 Update: French Fash Fail; Gaza Casualties May Exceed 186,000; Thiel's MIC Protege; TikTok as DisInfo Vector in Europe; IDF soldiers: "I'm Bored, So I Shoot" & the Hannibal Doctrine

May a thousand flowers bloom from Marine Le Pen's tears.

After a nail-biting few weeks and repeated entreaties from France's semi-finalist football team, France's voters dealt the Neo-Fascist Rassemblement National a shock defeat in yesterday's parliamentary elections, with the Nouvelle Front Populaire left wing coalition coming in first. Add that to Labor's clean sweep of Britain's parliamentary elections at the beginning of the month, and you're looking at a pretty severe reversal of the electoral forecast from earlier this summer.

We're getting down to the business end of both the European Championships and the Copa America. Some excellent games, a miserable performance from the U.S. National Team (sack Berhalter) and Turkey's best showing since the 2008 Euros. Too bad we'll see a game refereed this week by an official who recently served a six month ban for match-fixing in Germany...Sadly, centreback Merih Demiral did his best to ruin it all for an excellent Turkish side by making a Gray Wolf salute after scoring his second goal against Austria in the round of 16, prompting a two-match ban for the Fascist gesture. For more on the Gray Wolves and their bloody legacy in Turkey and within the diaspora, see the first episode of Skeleton Key.

The trial of Atomwaffen Division Samuel Woodward finally wrapped last week in Orange County Superior Courty, with a jury finding the Newport Beach native guilty of first degree murder with a hate crime enhancement for the January 2018 slaying of former high school classmate Blaze Bernstein. I attended segments of the three-month-long trial on and off this year, and will publish a summary piece on here later this week for paid subscribers. Here's my Guardian writeup from last Thursday. A lot got left on the cutting room floor, and I'll do my best to put that collage back together again.

Enough of all that. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-The Lancet, a leading medical journal which frequently takes on highly charged political issues (see their 2006 study of excess mortality after the American invasion of Iraq, published when it was unpopular to criticize the illegal invasion & occupation of that country). Their latest study examines possible excess mortality in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. Tracking casualties from the ongoing Israeli assault on the Palestinian territory is all but impossible given the lack of press and NGO access: the number often cited in the Western press hovers around a credulous 38,000 deaths, up only 4,000 since the New Year. The Lancet's findings put the possible death toll in excess of 186,000, roughly 8 percent of Gaza's entire population. Seems like prima facie evidence of genocide, and grist for the relevant charges currently being considered against the Netanyahu regime by the International Criminal Court.

-Far Right mogul Peter Thiel is a key architect of the American Far Right's recent ascendancy. After making his fortune as an early investor in PayPal and Facebook, Thiel branched out into the defense sphere, most notably underwriting the controversial surveillance contractor Palantir. He's got another defense-oriented firm that is attracting favorable press and winning government tenders: Anduril (yes LOTR geeks, that is the name of Aragon's sword), which builds autonomous surveillance fences and attack drones for the military. Anduril is helmed by Palmer Luckey, a young man with reactionary politics, a furry fetish and loads of cash earned from setting his Oculus virtual reality headset to Mark Zuckerberg. Sam Dean's final Los Angeles Times article (they've shed a lot of excellent talent recently) delves into Luckey's background and Anduril's upward trajectory.

-The extent of Xi Jinping's efforts to control political discourse about China overseas was aired out in an interesting Financial Times investigation last week. The British newspaper interviewed 10 Chinese nationals studying and working in the United States, who all recounted formal demands from the Chinese Communist Party to proactively burnish the country's image overseas. Such demands, which are viewed as essential for career advancement back home, come into direct conflict with laws like America's Foreign Agent Registration Act, and could jeopardize efforts to obtain green cards or citizenship in the future. As Sino-American tensions continue to ratchet up, expect to see this issue come to the fore again.

-I'm partial to VSquare as a news organization for selfish reasons: they roped me into an investigation of the Terrorgram Collective's influence on a Neo-Nazi mass shooter in Bratislava, Slovakia back in Fall 2022. The organization, which specializes in Central and Eastern European investigations, dove into the use of the wildly popular Chinese social media app TikTok by far right figures in Eastern Europe to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation. Worth keeping in mind that the domestic version of TikTok, Douyin, looks nothing like the platform foreigners see

-Nine months into the post-October 7 genocide, we're learning some key details about how the initial day of mayhem unfolded after Hamas commando units overwhelmed Israeli border units and overran nearby towns and kibbutzes, leaving 1,200 dead and taking more than 240 hostages. For months, there've been unconfirmed reports that Israeli military officials put the 'Hannibal doctrine' into effect - a free fire policy that essentially turns entire areas into a killing field, regardless of the presence of Israeli soldiers, civilians or captives. According to Ha'aretz, a yet-to-be identified senior military official did implement the Hannibal doctrine on October 7th. Though no numbers are given in the article, there have been reports of Israeli helicopters gunning down civilians and firing indiscriminately on vehicles, with the directive to let nothing on four or two wheels return to Gaza. Seems remarkably like the IDF's current 'rules' of engagement in Gaza, which +972 Magazine detailed today. One soldier's quote sums it it: "I'm bored, so I shoot."

FILM - Too much of contemporary soccer is pre-programmed and rote. You can blame any number of culprits: American statistical analysts, Pep Guardiola, youth coaches, it doesn't matter. The bottom line is there is a surfeit of hyper-athletic runners who can pass, cross and shoot with extreme accuracy and strength but think and play in rote, predictable patterns. This is NOT an era of playmakers, of Number 10s who could unlock opposing defenses with feints, swerves, mazy dribbles or line-splitting passes only they could envisage. In 2005, a documentary crew trained their cameras on one of the game's all-time legends, French maestro Zinedine Zidane, then at the height of his powers at Real Madrid. The technique is not innovative - it mimics a 1960s film that tracked Northern Irish maverick George Best through a complete match for Manchester United. You'll never see the sport the same way again.

BOOK - With two international tournaments running simultaenously and consuming much of my spare time the past month or so, I figured it's only appropriate to highlight my favorite book on the beautiful game. Uruguayan novelist and poet Eduardo Galeano was already a legend for works like his tremendous Open Veins of Latin America when he published Soccer in Sun and Shadow in 1998.

Broken up into 150 mini-chapters, the book touches on key moments in the game's history, individual players and clubs, soccer's historical roots, its political significance at moments in time, and an in-depth recital of each World Cup's key moments up through the last tournament of the 20th Century, when France won its first title at home in a legendary final against Brazil. Galeano continued to update the book with new editions for every World Cup until his death in 2015. A modern classic.

MUSIC - At my Sunday game, one of my friends on the opposing team wore a shirt with some eerily familiar graphic on it. During halftime, I made him show me the full design: it was one of the jumbled, riveting, highly political covers the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti commissioned for his mesmeric Afro-funk oevre in the 1970s and 1980s. The particular album Ibrahima had on his shirt was 'Coffin for Head of State' from 1981. I recommend starting with this and then working your way back or forward through Fela's body of work. Definitely a sound made for summer.