Iran’s Response to Israel’s Embassy Bombing: The Beginning of Biden’s War?

Iran’s airstrikes on Israel, an historic response to Israel’s act of state-terrorism against the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria on April 1st, are being touted as the next phase of a regional conflict playing out between the Israelis and Iranians; they have, however, much wider implications than Western policymakers and “journalists” regurgitating their party-line would have us believe. From the perspective of the American voter, it certainly cements the irrationality and dereliction of duty which has defined the Biden presidency, and it clearly demonstrates the incoherence and ideological quality of this president’s foreign policy vis a vis Israel and the rest of the world. What our leadership fails to consider, or at least want us not to consider, is the potential global implications of the escalation of this regional flashpoint. It doesn’t just mean a regional war between Israel and Iran; it doesn’t even just mean a US invasion of Iran; it has the potential to cement the drift of America’s various Eurasian opponents toward each other and to move up the world’s appointment with doomsday to the next few weeks or months.

Joe Biden the avowed Zionist has spent the last six months falling over himself to protect Israel from any real consequences for its brutal genocide in Gaza, and now Joe Biden the narcissistic legacy-preener wants to deescalate. Maybe, if he hadn’t allowed Israel to murder tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands of innocent people in Gaza without repercussions, they would have felt a little less confident violating Syrian sovereignty and bombing a diplomatic facility in the Syrian capital. Maybe, if he had pulled military aid to Israel at any point in the last several months, we wouldn’t be seeing that very American aid used to drag more and more countries, potentially including ourselves, directly into the conflict. Maybe, if he hadn’t participated in undermining the UN, particularly UNRRA, since October, Israel might be more inclined to listen to its pleas today. No such luck, and now the president who brought it all about is trying to calm the situation down. Biden’s reluctance to go to war with Iran, a perfectly sensible sentiment considering the impossibility of a net-positive outcome for any side in such a conflict, is nothing new. This very year he’s already resisted the Republicans’ demands to do something similar in response to far less, blessedly avoiding escalation before the Israelis beat him to the punch. His consistent renewal of sanctions relief against Iran, a too-little-too-late attempt to deescalate the regional conflict and rekindle the Iran nuclear deal, is also hard to square with his staunch support for Israel and backing of the Saudis in their war on Yemen. A rational decisionmaker, especially one acting solely in the national interest of the US, would not be carrying out an incoherent policy like this, suggesting his Zionism and his desire to be loved by the public are already at war on multiple fronts within his dying brain, just as America may yet be at war on a dying planet.

The rhetorical regionalization of this conflict, however, is an even bigger threat to the safety of the world than the president’s diplomatic dementia. It’s a hell of a lot easier to sell a war to American voters if they’re led to believe it will happen somewhere they can’t find on a map, but if they understood that it will involve kicking down their white picket fences and flattening their McMansions, they might just call their congressmen. It’s not just Palestinians taking a side in the coming conflict, and we should make no mistake that America’s more powerful (and more nuclear-armed) enemies see hay to be made of a regional war between Iran and US proxies like Israel. Considering Syria’s air defense is essentially controlled by Russia, its potential role in allowing an attack like this one can’t be ignored, especially since the Iranian response has the potential to further isolate the regime in Tehran and, in the event of a full-scale war, force it to seek international supporters like Russia. In the context of the war in Ukraine and Iran’s ongoing passive support for the Russians there, to force Tehran toward Russia could begin the crystallization of a security-oriented Eurasian axis countering the US empire and its allies. The relationship between the crisis in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine is even noted by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has more accurately identified the global geopolitical fault lines of the Biden era than Biden himself. One need only look at a map of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (the post-Soviet military alliance which includes much of Central Asia) to understand the geographic relevance of the Iranians to such a conflagration. When Iran’s gulf oil wealth is taken into account, driving it toward Russia becomes a terrifying prospect, saying nothing of how deepening shared Eurasian security interests might affect China’s rhetorical distance from these issues, and ultimately its attitude toward the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. The best case scenario if Eurasia pulls together in response to the American empire is an even more intractable Cold War than the one we’ve already been through, but the worst case is giving the jellyfish another few million years as the dominant species on earth.

Given the choice between the moral high ground of pulling the plug on Israel and the depraved depths of accelerating the New Cold War/World War III, sleepy Joe is thus far an incoherent flip-flopper. He’s trying to eat his cake and have it too, to appease Israel while deescalating with Iran, and it’s resulting in a situation where our nuclear-armed dog in the Middle East may just bite the wrong hand and drag us all with it. If the Cuban Missile Crisis were framed as a “regional conflict”, Americans in 1962 would have been as ignorant of the threat to their lives as they are in 2024. We must recognize the place this escalation has, especially in light of the war in Ukraine and the proximity of the Russians to the situation, within the wider context of global politics. The Levant today is not just a faraway place that American’s can ignore while they guzzle corn syrup, tune-in to submental streaming media, and tune out with prescription pills. The US frontier has been coming home since 9/11, let’s just hope it isn’t armed with nuclear warheads this time.

Free Speech in Germany

As German police crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters and activists, I can’t help but remember a meme that circulated a few years ago which heavily paraphrased philosopher Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” to justify silencing hateful speech (shown above). The upshot of this “paradox” is that intolerant views cannot be tolerated because, eventually, they will be able to institute their opposition to tolerance, and the logic of an open society will break down. At the time, liberals and some leftists on the internet were enthusiastic about censorship as the answer to everything from racism to right-wing domestic terrorism, with the reality of Germany’s Volksverhetzung laws banning various forms of hate-speech held up as exemplars of such protections against harmful speech and protectors of the kind of “tolerance” referenced in the Popper meme. Those leftists who participated in this internet “discourse” on hate-speech should consider today’s reality of anti-genocide activists being arrested and beaten for criticizing the State of Israel which, in Germany, is basically immune from criticism on pain of accusations of Holocaust denial. The internet’s abstract theorizing about censorship against the right has unsurprisingly evolved into a concrete reality of suppression of the left, and more importantly of the victims of Western-backed genocide.

The essential questions to ask in response to this old meme are “what qualifies as intolerance?” and “who decides?”, points which conveniently escaped attention when the goal was to silence right-wing opponents and restore the soul of America. A key German example of the potentially egregiously broad interpretation of intolerance-which-need-not-be-tolerated is the woman arrested in Berlin for writing “from the river to the sea” on social media. She, her phone, and all her computers were dragged out of her home because of a single instance of political speech, an obvious injustice, but perhaps more importantly for certain cynical leftists who don’t value free speech in itself, a strategic and practical threat to the left’s political goals. It turns out the answers to my questions are “whatever isn’t in the interests of the state” and “the state”; that is to say, the power to police “intolerance” is a power which can only ever really be held by the very capitalist state the left opposes so heartily. The liberals who wanted to lock up Nazis in America can look on with satisfaction, confident that the state they love so well is now stemming the flow of hatred and intolerance, but leftists are now forced to reckon with their ideologically-motivated capitulation to the very forces which they usually seek to confront and destroy.

Free speech has, at a minimum, an important instrumental value to those of us living under the auspices of the most powerful and depraved empire ever to exist. The one lever of power we still have firm control of, at least in places like the United States where free speech is meaningfully protected, is the ability to speak truth to power, unfettered by vacuous accusations of “hate” or “treason”. Even if one isn’t a dissident, when the speech of the dissident is suppressed, your ability to read what he has to say is as well. It’s not just the freedom to speak, but the freedom to hear, which is restricted by laws like these. More significantly however, free speech has a immeasurably deeper moral value to creatures like us whose defining feature is language and thought: the sustenance of our very humanity. The more our speech is restricted, and the more the use of our rational faculties is hemmed in by law and ideology, the less we are able to reach our real potential as human beings through journalism, criticism, fiction, and poetry. To limit speech is to castrate the human mind, to sterilize human history, and to relegate individual human beings to the status of machines made out of flesh. The Greek philosopher Arcesilaus once said that cocks may be made capons, but never capons into cocks. Let’s hope that the poor German capons might prove him wrong.

Ukraine-India Talks and the Russo-Ukrainian War

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba met with Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar of India on Friday, signaling a potential shift in New Delhi’s historically close relationship with India. Kuleba said Ukraine is “looking forward to restoring” its pre-invasion relationship with India, which took a neutral position on the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022 and repeatedly abstained from UN resolutions related to the war. The close relationship with Russia continues to hold, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi promising to boost ties to Russia in a meeting with Vladimir Putin on March 20. Ukraine is also looking to India as a leader of the Global South which, until now, has mostly looked on with skepticism toward the war, especially in the context of numerous comparable invasions in the Global South by other great powers.

While this meeting could be read as a breakthrough for the Ukrainians in their search for foreign support, which was certainly implied in Kuleba’s suggestion that India’s relationship to Russia is “evaporating“, the technical reality of disentangling the deep and very contemporary relationship between Russia and India is basically insurmountable in the short term. Russia is the largest arms supplier to India (despite ongoing attempts at diversification) with 36% of Indian arms imports coming from Russia, and they have regularly engaged in wargames prior to the Russo-Ukrainian War, indicating that the rhetoric of “special relationship” status is backed up by a very real and very close security relationship. The war has also prompted a search on the part of the Indians for alternative Rupee-based payment schemes which could circumvent international sanctions on Russia, potentially weakening the US dollar on the one hand, but also potentially driving India toward the West on the other, especially as its rival and neighbor China rises in economic power and moves closer to the Russians. Either way, the timescale on which these geopolitical and economic shifts are occurring is much too slow to cause an immediate rupture in the Russia-India special relationship, which dates back to the Cold War era when ties with the USSR strengthened and Indian skepticism of their old colonial masters was much higher, and it is unlikely that the Indians could serve a role much beyond a neutral mediator of future talks.

This developing situation needs greater attention, but unfortunately our hardworking friends in the mainstream press have mostly been copying and pasting the AP article on the subject, and available quotations of Kuleba or Jaishankar are filtered through AP’s editorial paraphrasing. It remains a significant development in a complex situation, with global economic and political implications, even if it can’t possibly have the immediate effects the Ukrainians or NATO might hope it to.

Ceasefire in Gaza?

The UN Security Council finally fanglessly called for a ceasefire in Gaza on Monday, incumbent upon the immediate release of all hostages on both sides and lasting for the duration of the month of Ramadan. The success of the vote emerges out of a US abstention, breaking with its previous policy of vetoing such votes against Israel, and subsequently laughably defended by the US State Department as “consistent with our principled position” that any call for a ceasefire must provide for the release of hostages. The vote remained an abstention because it lacked a performative denunciation of Hamas; such “principles” as the US might be able to claim apparently value political declarations more than the lives of innocent people. Even with their attempts to soften the blow of this policy shift by claiming there was “no change in policy”, Israel-US relations, or at least Israel-Democratic Party relations, have soured in the following days.

This follows Russia and China’s veto last week of the US ceasefire resolution which the Russians said didn’t go far enough. That proposal couched the language of ceasefire in much gentler terms, connecting the ceasefire more directly to the release of hostages and placing the possibility of a lasting ceasefire further down the line. The EU, another deep-pocketed backer of the state of Israel, also couched its statements in the language of “humanitarian pause” and working toward a “sustainable” ceasefire. The irony of Russia and China’s willingness to give Israel this gentle slap on the wrist is that they, much like the United States, have close trade and security ties with Israel. It is nowhere near as dependent upon them as it is upon the US, but these are by no means radically anti-Zionist states; Putin said in 2011 that “Israel is, in fact, a special state to us. It is practically a Russian-speaking country”, and China is Israel’s largest East Asian trade partner. These countries, which have clear economic incentives to support Israel, plus historically strong relations throughout the almost 80-year history of its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, couldn’t possibly be motivated by moral considerations for the children of Gaza. It is also inconceivable in light of the Russo-Ukrainian War that the Russians are truly interested in strengthening international law around the occupation of territory taken in war, despite references to international law made by both countries. There must be a deeper causal factor at play, the only one capable of trumping the power of economic incentives: geopolitics.

Israel’s condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine under ex-Prime Minister Yair Lapid, along with their willingness to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine and attempts to broach a settlement in that conflict, have caused a precipitous deterioration of the Israeli-Russian relationship. As boundaries are drawn in the New Cold War, Israel is being forced to take a side and bow to a master, something that it is usually rhetorically unwilling to do, despite already being a US puppet state in every technical sense. The war in Ukraine has also accelerated the relationship between Russia and Iran, particularly in light of their shared position vis-a-vis US sanctions regimes, placing Israel closer to the orbit of their arch-enemy in Tehran than they probably ever expected to be prior to 2022. With China playing a central role in any anti-US axis which might emerge as the New Cold War drags on, it too has a newfound moral inspiration on behalf of the Palestinians, despite its own cultural genocide of the Muslim Uyghurs. These are not humanitarian organizations reaching out to help the suffering people of the Arab world, they are calculating states, great powers attempting to gain any upper-hand they can in their struggle with the US and its allies/empire.

US willingness to break with their sacred policy of running interference for Israel in the UN does suggest that the contradiction between our geriatric president’s passionate Zionism and his desire to win reelection domestically (with American public opinion, especially among the Democrats’ liberal base, shifting so firmly against Israel) has reached a highpoint of tension. America’s loyalty to Israel, despite the politically and economically dependent status of that country, has finally hit home in a way that foreign policy rarely does for Americans, and the irrationality of allowing what is effectively a puppet regime to dictate to American policymakers has finally occurred to the people with their fingers on the button. Netanyahu, too, has domestic political considerations, with a prolonged war securing his place as Prime Minister in the face of Trumpian allegations of corruption which will probably see him in prison in the near future. Consequently, Israel says it “will not cease fire” and “will destroy Hamas and continue to fight until the last of the hostages returns home”, a tall order given that the Israelis have probably already murdered some of the hostages with their indiscriminate bombing. The true question is: if even countries upon which Israel isn’t dependent are willing to target Israel if it serves their interests, is the Biden administration capable of growing a spine and putting Israel in its place, or is its foreign policy so incoherent and ideological as to ignore the global geopolitical lines the US itself is drawing?

Blowback in Moscow

Friday’s brutal attack on the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk outside Moscow was a tragic reminder of the extent to which blowback against imperialist military projects can go. ISIS, claiming responsibility for the attack, has plenty of grudges against the Russians which could have motivated this murderous spree, from the Russian presence in Syria supporting Bashar al-Assad against the core ISIS territories, to the oppressed Chechen Muslim minority in Russia who have produced ISIS fighters in the past. With the Russia-based Wagner Group present in numerous other Muslim majority countries, there are minimally hundreds of thousands of people who’d like to see the Russians suffer outside of the obvious, but generally non-Muslim, Ukrainians.

With Russia stating an interest in closer anti-terrorism cooperation with their traditional opponent, NATO member Turkey, this attack also has the potential to bring about wider geopolitical ramifications, especially in light of Assad’s victory in the Syrian Civil War and the corresponding failure of the Turkish occupation and support for rebels there. Absent the potential victory of (at the time) NATO friendly rebels in the Syrian Free Army or the potential defeat of the Kurds in their regional struggle for liberation, Syria and Turkey now have more in common strategically, in particular the fact that they both rule over parts of Kurdistan (much like Syrian ally Iran). With Erdogan’s increasingly neo-nationalistic and even Putinistic centralization of power, the geopolitical reasons for a Russia-focused realignment of regional powers like Turkey have a domestic-political element as well, not to mention Turkey’s interest in seeing a speedy end to the war in Ukraine.

Most importantly, however, we must remember the real root cause of terrorist attacks like these, from Moscow to Jerusalem to Manhattan: the brutal imperial domination of the Third World by great powers. ISIS wouldn’t even exist, let alone be conducting attacks in Russia, without Western intervention in the Middle East. It emerged directly out of the 2003 Iraq War, with the US purge of Ba’athist elements from the Iraqi military and bureaucracy driving thousands of party members into insurgency and ultimately into the hands of ISIS; with the basic pressures driving regional radicalization going back to the Sykes-Picot agreement (which involved Russia) partitioning the Ottoman Empire after WWI, and even further back into the age of Turkish domination of the Arab world under the Ottoman Empire (the blowback to which was celebrated in the 1962 epic-film masterpiece “Lawrence of Arabia”). In this case, Islam is the ideological and justificatory fig leaf placed over a fight against the systematic disempowerment of oppressed peoples in the Middle East and the broader Muslim World stretching back hundreds of years, an oppression to which the Russians have been an active party for at least a century, and of which the Turks have been the perpetrators for much longer than that.

Even if we take seriously Vladimir Putin’s attempts to connect this attack to Ukraine, blowback against imperialism is still necessary as an explanatory tool for understanding such mass political violence. While we might condemn the murder of innocent people over a political question, how surprised could we really be if radicalized Ukrainians decided to attack a public space in Russia? Even if the justice of such an attack isn’t apparent to us in our coddled digital world of instant food delivery services and same-day shipping, it’s not hard, with an ounce of empathy and the simple capacity to place oneself in another’s shoes, to see why these attacks happen. Just imagine if, not only weren’t you able to order fast food on an app, but you weren’t able to access food at all. Imagine your entire family has been killed by Russian (or American) airstrikes. Suddenly the Crocus Attack, vile and murderous as it was, looks like an understandable response to an inhuman nightmare, and the same would be true if it happened in Brussels or Washington or Tel Aviv.

Russia/Ukraine After Virality: What Happens When the West Loses Interest?

As the attention of Western media consumers turns to the genocide of the Palestinians and the ongoing US presidential race/nursing home enrichment activity, the people of Ukraine continue to suffer under the twin boots of Russian invasion and NATO proxy status, but what does the fast-paced and largely amoral drift of the internet’s algorithmic attention mean for the suffering people of that country? Perhaps even more importantly, in particular for the new Palestinian subjects of this digital pseudo-politics, what does it mean for US foreign policy and global politics to be underwritten by memes?

The memeification of politics has been accelerating at a fevered pace since Trump’s 2016 electoral upset, with multiple internet-based candidates vying for president in the years since and the national consciousness dragged around by the nose by the internet “discourse” and it’s suckers in the non-digital press, only to be exacerbated further by locking everyone inside with their phones for two years. People’s understanding of politics is now not just mediated by memes and cursory readings of the titles of articles, it consists primarily of the memes themselves. The drive to participate in the current ideological fashion trend has crowded out real politics and incorporated political movements into the technical apparatus of the internet and its owners. When this collective schizophrenia of Western public attention shifted its paranoid gaze from race war and the COVID-19 Pandemic to the war in Ukraine, it seemed, perhaps most acutely to the Ukrainians themselves, that a deeply hidden moral fiber had been discovered and activated within the keyboard warriors of the memetic mob. Little did they know that neither the Western World’s screen-addicted populace nor our cynically calculating leaders have any deep concern for anything but entertainment and security. Now, with the war turning in the other direction and American politics shifting toward passionate endorsement and condemnation of xenophobia and genocide, the Ukrainians are left without any clicks in the attention economy.

Ultimately, the optimism of the Ukrainian people that westerners truly had a humanitarian concern for their nation is understandable, but it was also a deep error spawned from a misunderstanding of what the West seeks to gain from a conflict in Eastern Europe. Viewed through the prism of Euroskepticism and pro-Europeanism, it seems like a black and white ideological battle between tolerant European liberal democracy and reactionary Russian autocracy had opened up a flashpoint with the Maidan Revolution, a potential moment of rupture in the status quo out of which something new could be born. The reality, however, is far bleaker. The geopolitical situation, namely an oil-rich, heavily nuclear armed nation whose key regional subjects have been peeling away from it since the ’90s, along with an ever extending military alliance (NATO) whose sole purpose in existence was originally to counter that nation, leaves little room for the consideration of EU regulatory policy or Ukrainian election integrity. Much as the US once used Afghan mujahideen as a tool in the fight against the Soviet Union without regard for the interests of the Afghan people, they are now using the Ukrainian people as an anvil on which to place Putin’s Russia. The crippling sanctions regime and open calls for regime change in Russia, along with the constant implicit threat of nuclear apocalypse on both sides, are the hammer. Because media consumers and Ukrainians fell for the propaganda about the nature of this conflict, the puppet masters behind the scenes in Washington and Moscow have been able to escalate the new “geopolitical era” and reignite the Cold War between Russia and the US, while memetically smuggling in new ideological justifications to replace the old communism vs. capitalism angle in the minds of regular people. It has created a great opportunity for the US defense industry, and for terminally online Twitter “activists” looking for a new flag emoji to put in their display names, but it has also wreaked yet-untold horrors upon the people of Ukraine.

As the meme economy shifts its attention to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians, they too hold some hope for change-from-above, or more correctly, change-from-the-West, in their struggle. I firmly hope that a new stage has been reached in the propaganda battle around the Palestinian question, but I am cautious in trusting the same people who have previously cared passionately about Ukrainians, the elderly/immunocompromised, black victims of police violence, Trump’s “kids in cages”, and many other suffering victims of the US Empire who continue to suffer without even the slightest palliative measures taken to help them. When faced with a seemingly impassable threat, it will always seem wise to call on the power of the Great Satan, but the Faustian bargain must be repaid, and the attention span of Twitter liberals is the collector of the devil’s due. If an empire has its boot on your neck, another empire’s “support” is the last thing you need.

Human Rights in the Time of Palestinian Genocide

I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the staffers at USAID, who seem to have finally noticed that they work for the PR arm of the CIA and not a mosquito net NGO; and all it took was the US government’s explicit (and in no way unprecedented) support and endorsement of a genocide for them to see it! At least, that is, the ones working for Samantha Power have noticed, to which all I can say is that they should probably stop taking their bosses’ vanity publications at face value; let’s just say Debbie from HR isn’t posting about the food bank on Linkedin because she cares about homeless people.

“Human rights” get a lot of play in academia and media, and if you dig past the pious mumblings of elite liberals and the Military Industrial Complex, they could be read as the core theological assumption of the West’s covert religious perspective, a perspective baked into the international institutions to which all nations are subjected. In a country where such apostles of Humanism as neuroscientist and socially-acceptable demagogue Sam Harris advocate first-strike nuclear attacks on Muslim civilians to protect those very civilians human “rights”, it should surprise us little that human rights only exist in an ideal realm where there are no actual human beings to whom those rights could apply. Somehow, however, people like Power and her minions continue to be well received when they peddle the idea that the single largest global exporter of military coups is actually the greatest defender of human rights and the only obstacle to new Holocausts. This, despite the fact that the period of US global dominance has seen dozens of genocides, some under the direct supervision and support of the “civilized” Western world and its regime of human rights. The key to this paradox lies in the method of genocide prevention and human rights protection advocated by such soulless characters: geopolitical power projection and direct military intervention.

From Russia’s “holy war” against fascism in Ukraine to George W. Bush’s “crusade” against terrorism in whichever country he decides invented terrorism, the justification of human rights atrocities with the concept of human rights is a recurring theme of contemporary global politics. Such justification is actually the primary instrumental purpose of this rhetoric, with political power balancing being the only real motivating factor for states and their puppeteers. The USSR loved communism, until they noticed anti-Soviet Trotskyists fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War; America loves democracy, until they notice pro-Soviet Marxists have been democratically elected in Chile; the Russian Federation is the bulwark against fascism, until some fascist paramilitaries offer up their services in invading Ukraine. The real question is one of power for states and political blocs, the ideological element is only a useful justification in the event that it supports the advancement of power politics.

In the case of the Palestinian people, one need only remember the moralizing about the Uyghur genocide that took the internet-based “discourse” by storm a few years ago. The Chinese detainment, ethnic cleansing, and cultural genocide of the Muslim Uyghurs, always justified with the logic of counter-terrorism and “self-defense”, directly paralleled the Palestinian genocide in many ways, until the Palestinians’ suffering escalated following October 7th. All the human rights crusaders who wanted “stand up to China” on the Uyghur question have changed their tune now. They aren’t just silent on the Palestinian question, most of the defenders of the Uyghurs are now vocally defending Israel’s genocide. This time, rather than cultural genocide in the form of forced reeducation and the destruction of Uyghurs’ culture and religious heritage, the Israelis are truly and explicitly committing a physical genocide of the people of Gaza. Now, over 30,000 people into an open act of genocide, the reactions of humanitarians like Power and Harris range from gentle critiques and calls for dropping crates on people’s heads, to condemnation of Islam itself as the real cause of the conflict, furthering the narrative of a clash between the “human rights” oriented civilization of the West, and the Islamic civilization of the faceless oriental Other. I hope that maybe as more innocent people are fed into the gears of the Israeli military machine, more beltway ghouls and mindless media consumers will notice that they are the very goosestepping fascists they so desire to see bombed, couped, and invaded out of existence.

The Houthis Part the Red Sea

With the decision by the Houthis in Yemen to refuse Red Sea access to international shipping, Americans are learning about the existence of yet another foreign country. The world-historic strategic blunder of uncritically supporting Israel in its escalations in Gaza has come to fruition, and now the US must decide what to do with its harvest. It’s hard to imagine how else the powermongers in Washington could have imagined their strategy working out, but it went about as well as any thinking person could have predicted. The sparking of this dangerous international flashpoint in a regional proxy war America has already been losing to the Iranians on its Iraqi and Syrian fronts is a grave strategic error based on what appears to be primarily ideological reasoning surrounding the state of Israel. Some latent understanding of this mistake almost certainly underlies the US insistence on an end to the Gaza conflict by the new year. The murder of tens of thousands of civilians isn’t enough to elicit that kind of response, but the risk to global supply chains and US domestic gas prices posed by a regional escalation seems to be.

And supply chain risk there is, with around half of global shipping controlled by the major shipping companies that have pulled out so far, and a third of all shipping vessels globally passing through the Red Sea regularly. The Houthis seem to know exactly where to hit the West so that it will hurt, and they are ironically doing to Israel and the US exactly what the US and its allies have been doing to Russia since the start of their war in the Ukraine. The only difference between these two blockades is the degree of institutional and moral legitimacy they are afforded in reports by Western media. If you’re heavily invested in shipping interests, however, you have nothing to fear, as both shipping rates and shipping company stock prices are shooting up in response to the inability of these companies to perform the service they supposedly exist to provide. In the 21^st century, every day is a good day to be an overfed parasite.

The significance of these changes in the Red Sea is particularly notable in the details of the Houthi attacks and the international response. On December 16^th, the destroyer USS Carney shot down a huge barrage of 14 one-way attack drones from Yemen, part of the ongoing escalations in the Red Sea which began when the Israelis decided to escalate their conflict with Hamas into an act of mass murder. Last month we witnessed the first-ever offensive use of an anti-ship ballistic missile, fired at a Liberian ship by the Houthis. This has global significance both in that it signals a new technological development in naval combat, and that it suggests the shadow of Iranian (and potentially other) international support for the Houthis and proves the proxy status of both these conflicts. Additionally, as the US attempts to marshal a response to the Houthis, the notable absence of the Egyptians and the Saudis in that coalition stands out. The intentions of the Egyptians in particular must be considered when their economic dependence upon the Suez Canal and control of the southern border of Gaza is taken into account. Why exactly would these countries prefer a closed Red Sea to an open one? With the continued stability of the Egyptian government never a secure prospect, particularly given the impact of Houthi actions on its Suez revenues, and the immense regional pressure on powerful Arab nations like Egypt and Saudi to respond in some way to the slaughter of thousands of Gazans, the exact scale of the Palestine flashpoint and its full potential to boil over regionally is still to be seen.

The failure to anticipate this obvious connection between Gaza and Yemen totally escaped the minds of the politicians and “experts” managing our foreign policy, even such illustrious hypocrites as Bernie Sanders, who once very vocally opposed US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and now enthusiastically endorses US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Why oppose one front of a regional proxy conflict with Iran while supporting another? And what of the human rights of Palestinians, when he was so concerned about the human rights of Yemenis? Why was it incumbent upon Saudi Arabia to cease its bombings of children in Yemen but not on Israel to do the same in Gaza? While we may never know the mind of the stoic senator from Vermont, his position on this is coincidental with the ideological orthodoxies around Israel which have gangrenously infected the US political sphere in general. The tragedy is that so many believed for so long that there was a humane voice in the US Senate at all.

Henry Kissinger 1923-2023

It is with great sadness that we must announce that the soul of former U.S. Secretary of State and noted war criminal Heinz “Henry” Alfred Kissinger passed into the flames of hell on Wednesday, November 29, 2023, surrounded by security guards and last-minute flatterers. Henry was a career company man, beloved by his employers at the U.S. Military Industrial Complex and remembered by his friends at the Bohemian Grove for his endearingly ominous German accent.

As a key intellectual apostle of the theoretical school of geopolitics, Kissinger was deeply indebted to the thought of such figures as German proto-fascist Oswald Spengler, Swedish proto-fascist Rudolf Kjellen, and co-founder of the London School of Economics Halford Mackinder. Kissinger’s Harvard thesis was specifically about the thought of Spengler and Mackinder, whose ideas guided his own until the blood stopped flowing into his brain last week.

The basic structure of early geopolitical thinking was one built around geographic determinism and an organic theory of “civilizations” rooted in geographical space which pitted the “West” as an organic totalizing entity against other civilizations. The content of this theory, especially in its German form as Geopolitik, was metabolized in important ways by the Nazis. Kjellen’s protégé, proto-fascist Karl Haushofer, coined the term Geopolitik itself, and his student, actual-fascist Rudolf Hess, helped Adolf Hitler incorporate the logic of organic civilizations into Nazi ideology so early on that traces of it can be found in Mein Kampf. Haushofer even coined the term Lebensraum, German for “living space”, which became a key justificatory concept for a minor disagreement now known as the Second World War.

The main distinction between Kissinger and his progenitors was that he lacked their fundamental pessimism about the state of Western Civilization and their denial of the freedom of individual actors to turn back the tides of history on behalf of their preferred civilizational construct. Less like Spengler, and more like Haushofer and Hess, Kissinger believed in the power of individual human beings to use a little wit, sticktoitiveness, and old-fashioned capital-w Will to take a revisionist position against the tide. He, like all great reactionaries, wished to stand athwart history shouting “stop”, but unlike so many of them, he believed with his whole heart that it would listen. And listen it did, as illegal bombs fell on Cambodia and Laos, the Chilean military closed in on its own democratically elected government, and American industry departed our shores for the freedom of the People’s Republic of China, all in the name of the National Interest™.

Kissinger was instrumental in making this sort of amoral nationalist Realpolitik into the standard approach to foreign policy, not just among foreign policy intellectuals, but also among most hobbyists and “geopolitical analysts” on the contemporary internet. One need only Google “global politics” to stumble upon our generation’s most brilliant political theorists tweeting things like “maybe a tactical nuke wouldn’t be the worst thing for the Ukraine” under handles like @basedgeopoliticsnerd. To the extent that Americans know anything about foreign policy and international relations, it has been filtered through a Kissingerian lens to the point of being basically false. Kissinger would be thrilled with this, of course, as he was not just a relativist about killing Cambodian children, but also about the existence of truth, writing in the 60’s “There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.”

After accomplishing basically everything he set out to do with his career, killing potentially millions of people and influencing all subsequent American foreign policy thinking, Henry Kissinger died rich at 100 years old. One has to ask: what exactly is the left celebrating when they piss on Kissinger’s grave? If he had died during the Nixon administration, there might have been room for celebration, in which case very few Americans would even remember he existed. If he had croaked before becoming Chair of the 9/11 Commission it might have been worthy of a celebratory brunch or something. For him to die at the end of an extremely successful series of confidence scams based on old philosophy nobody has read with a pile of money under his pillow sounds like a major win to me.

Henry Kissinger is predeceased by Chilean President Salvador Allende, several hundred thousand Cambodians, the people of East Timor, and countless nameless victims expunged from history by the Western media and academy. He is survived by his wife, “philanthropist” Nancy Kissinger, and his two children David and Elizabeth. Dead flowers and bottles of piss may be sent to Kissinger Associates Inc. in New York.

A Fleeting 9/10 Becomes an Eternal 9/12: 20 Years After the Imperial Frontier Came Home

Tribute in Light, which began in 2002 as a temporary installation to commemorate the 9/11 attacks, subsequently became an annual event.

September 10, 2001 represents the last unremarkable day of what, for many Americans, was an unremarkable decade between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror. The neoliberal dream of the ’90s came crashing down with the towers of the World Trade Center, and along with them, the dream of US global hegemony unrestrained by violent, if asymmetrical, global resistance. By the time the wheels were rolling on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the support of the “liberal international order” which had enthusiastically rallied around our Empire since at least the beginning of the Cold War, and even more robustly during the 1990s, was also no longer guaranteed. The frontier of the American Empire had arrived at its heart, and we were powerless to reverse the process our hubris had created. Without political capital to leverage beyond bellicose nationalism, American exceptionalism, and general fear born domestically out of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies slipped off the Empire’s mask and descended the world into the eternal 9/12 of the 21st century.

Just as the perpetual crisis-footing on which the world stands today could never be imagined without the shock of the 9/11 attacks, the attacks themselves would never have happened without the Fukuyamaist “end of history” of the 1990s, which was still very much a reality on the placid Monday before 9/11. Seemingly without any meaningful external competitor to its power and influence, the newly internationally hegemonic United States anointed itself the unilateral ruler of the world and inserted itself into the concerns of people far outside the traditional US sphere of influence. The global geopolitical apparatus constructed to counter the Soviet Union was turned loose on myriad political and social problems around the world, often at the expense of the sovereignty, security, and general wellbeing of regional powers and people on the ground. Yugoslavia and Iraq, once useful buffer states against Soviet influence in Southern Europe and the Middle East respectively, were no longer the subject of US policymakers’ strategic support. The H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations’ cynical manipulation of the concepts of self-determination and “humanitarian” intervention, with the support of the “liberal order”, destroyed Yugoslavia, where the hopes of a significant population of Bosniak and Albanian Muslims were leveraged as political and military proxies against a non-aligned socialist state which was no longer of use to the Empire. The First Gulf War was the first phase of a similar end for the nation of Iraq, supported by the “liberal order”, in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The invasion of Kuwait, of course, was conspicuously similar to the US invasion of Panama just a year earlier in its economic, legal, political, and moral details; the distinguishing factor for the “liberal order” being that Panama was just another a US cleanup operation in a once-useful anti-communist buffer state, whereas Kuwait was a challenge to the “order” of the international system by an uppity regional power. In the Middle East, after more than 60 years of US imperial presence, support for asymmetrical and often jihadist elements against the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War which was ostensibly the reason for our presence in the first place, US troops, proxies, arms, money, and perhaps most importantly, client states remained. The self-satisfied, world-striding US Empire at the end of history refused to give the Muslim world, or the rest of the world for that matter, room to breathe.

This remarkable reality of the unremarkable 1990s was directly referenced in Osama bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa declaring jihad against the United States, in particular blood spilt by Muslims in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as Israel and Saudi Arabia’s status as US client states which effectively allow western troops to occupy the holiest sites of Islam. The comparison to the medieval Crusades is, somewhat appropriately, also made in the fatwa. Despite the religious content and aesthetics of the document, the power of material forces, i.e. the necessity of US/western access to cheap Saudi oil and the US interest in a nominally liberal democratic outpost in the Levant, becomes explicit upon reading it. US insistence on occupying a culturally and politically complex region for purely economic and geopolitical reasons, a region which we had deliberately further complicated over several prior decades, through the ’90s and almost two years into the new millennium was clearly a driving force behind the attacks. It would seem Americans aren’t the only ones upset about “forever wars”, despite noted ghoul Tony Blair’s imbecilic comments about that highly accurate slogan, the key difference being that the people of the Global South and the imperial periphery have known about US forever wars since 1789; the frontier was always their home.

Despite neoliberal and neoconservative pearl clutching about Trump’s “undermining” of the “liberal international order”, the state of decline in which the American Empire finds itself, and the decay of the international order it established after WWII, are not new phenomena. In fact, the destruction of American prosperity (formerly derived from our now-crumbling infrastructure and manufacturing base) and global hegemony (for which the “liberal international order” is a political fig leaf) can be laid squarely at the feat of the neoliberals and neoconservatives respectively. The dual ideologies of universal marketization (neoliberalism) and foreign policy unilateralism (neoconservatism) have truly undermined the capitalist mixed economy and multilateral foreign policy which the generation who survived the Great Depression had left for us, and along with them they have, probably irreversibly, undermined the American Empire. Doesn’t the fact that the very support for jihadi terrorist groups that spawned the 9/11 attacks continued in the subsequent period suggest that Trump was an extreme latecomer to this process of “undermining” US global power? 9/11 was a watershed moment in this process, it is the identifiable point of no return where the America that Trump and his followers believe was once “great” ceased to be salvageable. Our abuses abroad, driven by an all-consuming American ruling capitalist class and stretching back to when our foreign policy apparatus was the military arm of American slave-power, had finally reached a point of critical-mass; the quantitative increase in our global capacity for evil tilted into a qualitative shift toward imperial decline. This new and highly remarkable reality doesn’t bode well for the United States, but I wonder if it might come as welcome news to the throngs of people living under our international boot.

PLEASE DONATE TO THE FAMILIES OF 9/11 VICTIMS